Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.
Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts. He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.
The lesson is clear. If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals. In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.
The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe. That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).
Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?
Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.
Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”? I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing. Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017. I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”. Enough; please, enough! Put it to bed.
The reason is obvious. This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign. The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.
The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”. But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”). It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss. From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser. Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.
Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates? The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project). It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).
Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe. Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets. Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.
Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us. Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual. Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor. The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.
Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)
We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand. The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous. The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians. Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar. Maybe that’s true.
The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump. But there’s a fly in the ointment. They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins. Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.
They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The winner was falsely covered in mud. Shockingly, it happened to be Trump. If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)
The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element. The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner. For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.
A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor). The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers. The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.
Too much heat can destroy things. The same is true of political heat. It wreaks havoc on the language. For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.
I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology. I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora. It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore. All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals. It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.
Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible. Apple and Android are riding on his back.
Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.
The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it. Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process. Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.
“Old” is all around us. It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”. Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity. They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum. He just found a way to use it. Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity. They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).
Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.
“Old” is everywhere. If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).
“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads. Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power. Power to do what? Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders. Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy. The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works. That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.
Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field. Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”. Sounds great, and is. The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.
The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways. First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way. Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley. Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.
Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”. What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking? It’s balderdash.
Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”. “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition. Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument. No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language. Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.
Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.
I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states. Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices. More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.
I. California and Blue State Taxes.
April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds. Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations. Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.
Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard
First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks. Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less. We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year. Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.
Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch. The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).
The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions. Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography. The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly. I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs. As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments. How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party? Hmmmm, I wonder.
Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help. Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state. It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting. Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier. It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law. Why is that? You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state. Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover. It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.
Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.
II. California’s Gas Prices.
Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices. But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats. A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for. The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism. Borenstein gave them one.
Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley
Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up. Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law. There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand. The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.
The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country. Such markets still have supply and demand. It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.
A beleaguered California resident?
This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker. The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality. If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.
And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC. And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas. I guess that you get what you vote for.
The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage. Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.
A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story. It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power. Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?
Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control? If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.
Examples abound.
Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake. For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned. Belief cometh before proof. So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.
But what of Eric Holder?
AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.
Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation. 17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder. The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media. That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes. These aren’t “contempt of court”. If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.
And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases. Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).
The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends. How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?
By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want. But they don’t want. They want power and that means Trump’s scalp. This isn’t about the truth. It’s about naked, raw power.
In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information. Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing. Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name. Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters. Go figure.
In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice. Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life. In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.
Alex Cora speaks to the press about the boycott before Monday’s game in Baltimore.
I just learned in “Axios AM” of the Red Sox partial boycott of the traditional White House visit to celebrate their World Series championship. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about Trump, but admittedly even more so with the radical lefty lurch of the Democratic Party. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about organized partisan political acts by athletes. Alex Cora, the manager, and some of the players say that they won’t attend. Well, now I have another team who has muddied itself with partisan politics to avoid. When will this stop?
Of course, Axios couldn’t help but portray the spat in skin color terms … and so do the boycotting players. The poison of reducing moral claims to melanin counts, cultural identities, and ritual assertions of victimhood has penetrated the locker room. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
It’s disgusting. I’m reminded of an audience’s shout to singer James Taylor when he got political: “Shut up and sing!” A parallel?
Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018 was quoted as saying before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. I would take it further. Any of the deep blue dots on the election map are, by definition, “extremely left-leaning place[s]”.
Today, almost any large institution or organization in our densely-packed urban nodes is likely to be an “extremely left-leaning place”. An example would be our tech giants like Google (or Alphabet, Inc). Daily, we are exposed to the socio-political biases of these “extremely left-leaning place[s]”. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) in Montana was recently confronted with it. (see here)
Google employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The RMEF had been running ads on Google for years. In April, they were email notified by a Google employee that it would be no more. It seems that Google has a policy against hunting. Somebody apparently did a Google search on the RMEF. The RMEF quickly appealed to the Montana congressional delegation and the rejection was reversed.
Whether Google has a policy in opposition to hunting isn’t the pertinent question. Our gaze should be directed at the Google workroom. What’s happening in there? I suspect, with good reason, that they have an “extremely left-leaning” population at work. To them, nature is a Disney cartoon; hunting is cruelty; and we should all be vegan anyway. Hippie food stores and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation don’t go together.
Just another reminder that urbanity-as-in-citified is synonymous with eco-zealotry, gender fluidity, and Bernie bros/gals.
This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Anita Hill testifies at the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas. 1991.
Please read Mollie Hemingway’s piece in The Federalist, “Joe Biden on Anita Hill in 1998: ‘She Was Lying’”. At the time in 1991, there was good reason for 58% of polled Americans believing Clarence Thomas and 24% Anita Hill. All this is forgotten in the recent resuscitation of Anita Hill as the patron saint of #MeToo. The history of the time paints a radically different picture, and exposes Joe Biden to the charge of craven political groveling. Ironically, the lightweights of deep thought on The View brought it to light.
Joe Biden with the ladies on The View, Friday, 4/26/19.
Hemingway compares Biden’s comments on The View with Sen. Arlen Specter’s account from his 2000 memoir.
Sen. Arlen Specter on the Judiciary Committee from 2007.
Specter (deceased in 2012) and Biden were on the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the 1991 Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court. Specter quotes the Biden of 1998 contradicting the Biden of 2019. The 1998 Biden confessed to Specter, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying”. The 2019 Biden confessed to leftie high priestess Joy Behar, “I believed her from the beginning”.
So, we have A and not-A, matter and anti-matter, and I still don’t know how to bring the two together without exploding.
Anita Hill receives counsel from Charles Ogeltree while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October, 1991. (Greg Gibson/AP)
Hill’s liberal beatification doesn’t come out of this unsoiled either. Her answers before the committee on cross-examination were, to put it mildly, disturbing, even to those anxious to “Bork” Thomas. She tried to deny prior complimentary comments of Thomas that were corroborated by multiple witnesses. She denied that she knew one witness who said that Hill’s charges “were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her”. Later she was forced to admit that she knew the witness after others were willing to come forward with confirmation.
The contradictions don’t stop with denials of knowing people. Her statements before the committee were far more colorful and dramatic than those given to the FBI, something she had trouble explaining.
Then she was asked about a USA Today article that described an arrangement proffered to her by a Senate Democratic staffer for her to make a deposition against Thomas and it would be discreetly divulged to Thomas resulting, presumably, in him asking to withdraw his nomination, all done with anonymity for Hill. It’s a repeat of the 1987 play against Reagan’s nomination of Judge Ginsburg. She denied any knowledge of the offer and became evasive. This is what prompted Biden in 1998 to confess to Specter that she was lying.
Robert Bork at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 18, 1987. (CNP/Getty Images)
Remember, the Thomas nomination came just 4 years after the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg fights. The Democrats were beginning the slide into the political tar pits for Supreme Court nominations. What worked against Ginsburg was redeployed against Thomas and later against Kavanaugh.
Sen. Joe Biden confers with Sen. Edward Kennedy. Kennedy would lead the fight to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork.
Anita Hill isn’t a saint. The 1998 Joe Biden was correct in catching the putrid smell of her testimony. The 2019 Joe Biden shows another side of the man. He’s a craven politician. If he has to be a SJW (social justice warrior), he can do that.
Joe Biden ain’t “lunch-pail Joe” since the real lunch-pail Joes are the “basket of deplorables” to today’s “woke” Democratic Party. Call him shape-shifter Joe.
Kudos to Mollie Hemingway for removing the vail obscuring both the real Joe Biden and the real Anita Hill.
Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.
Compare Amy Harder’s Axiospiece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbesarticle from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”. The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy. The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy. In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.
Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:
* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century. Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.
* Solar and wind are expensive. They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help. Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.
* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense. They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.
* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste. What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?
The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.
The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points. I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.
