So much for Reason Magazine

They have said for years that they are libertarian.  That's not true.  By their works shall ye know them, and all that.

Rather, they're Washington Establishment, Libertarian Department.  Everything is not pro-liberty, it's anti-Trump, all the time.  (Speculation Alert) Probably their big donors insist on this, and you can't jeopardize the gravy train.

Case in point: Trump's biggest libertarian action to date (which dwarfs the DOGE spending cuts) is his executive order requiring each Agency to post all the regulations they have promulgated which have criminal penalties, and requiring the Agencies to rescind all that do not have a Mens Rea requirement. Seemingly there are hundreds of thousands of these, and not even the Agencies themselves know exactly how many.  Thus, the need for the executive order.

Mens Rea is the legal term that defines knowledge that you are about to commit a crime - regulations with criminal penalties where you don't even have to know that it's a crime are basically the definition of tyranny.

You'd think that libertarians would be cheering this executive order from the rooftops. 

[crickets]

I can only find one article on the subject which, despite its reluctance to do so gives credit where it is due.  They even say this sort of regulation turns the rule of law into a cruel joke.  So where's the celebration of a huge win for freedom?  Where's the victory lap for self-proclaimed champions of "Free Minds and Free Markets"?

To ask the questions are to answer them.  Donald Trump obviously provides the Wrong Sort of freedom.  [rolls eyes]

Tagged Statist Pricks, Hypocrites R Us, and Filthy Lucre because, well, you know.

HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises. 

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Crisis by (Government) Design vs. DOGE

Peter brings up a point I've been making for quite a while that is being highlighted by Elon's DOGE:

It doesn't give enough attention, IMHO, to the "poverty industry" of NGO's, consultants, therapists and others who make a good living out of "managing" or "addressing" the causes, effects and reality of poverty, without ever doing anything to resolve the issues they identify - because that would cut off their income, and nobody (at least, from their perspective) wants that.

It's Rich People's Leftism:

Rich People's Leftism is one of the clearest explanations I've ever seen for the utter failure of government in Blue States:

With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).

RPL thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.

You really should click through to read about Rich People's Leftism, which dates to 2010.  We've known about this for a long, long time.  A different view is "red pill/blue pill": 

... an old post from Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?) gives the best introduction to the topic, phrased in explicitly "Blue Pill"/"Red Pill" terminology:

The nature of the state

• The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
• The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don’t.

You should read Isegoria's post as well.  Then think about the proposed $3.5T spending bill that is before congress.  Who will it help?  Who are we told that is is going to help, but won't?  To ask the questions is to answer them.

What is interesting about the opening moves of DOGE is that we are now getting names to put next to all the Rich People's Leftism projects.

Why to Democrats hate the poor, elderly, and the environment?

Biden quietly bans gas-powered tankless water heaters.

These are the most efficient design, so Democrats obviously hate the environment.  People will use less efficient models and burn more fuel.

And these are the least expensive models.  Manufacturers expect the ban to add $450 to the price of new water heaters.  The poor and elderly hardest hit.

Holy cow, the Democratic party really sucks.

Interesting Security News

Item the first: follow the money:

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) held its first-ever automotive-focused Pwn2Own event in Tokyo last week, and awarded over $1.3 million to the discoverers of 49 vehicle-related zero day vulnerabilities.

Researchers from French security outfit Synacktiv took home $450,000 after demonstrating six successful exploits, one of which saw the company’s crew gain root access to a Tesla Modem. Another effort found a sandbox escape in the Musk-mobiles’ infotainment system.

Other popular targets at the three day event included after-market infotainment systems and, more troublingly, a whole host of successful hacks on EV chargers.

This is a good strategy - show me the hack, I'll show you the money.  More, please.  Plus, good on them picking automotive computing as the target.  Long time readers will recall that this is something I've been harping on for quite some time.

Item the second: SEC gets pwned (same link as above): 

We had our suspicions when Twitter/X blamed the US Securities and Exchange Commission for the account takeover that led to the premature release of news the regulator would allow Bitcoin exchange-traded funds– and those suspicions have been confirmed.

"The SEC determined that the unauthorized party obtained control of the SEC cell phone number associated with the account in an apparent 'SIM swap' attack," the Commission admitted last week.

For those unfamiliar with this form of attack, SIM swaps involve convincing a telecom carrier to transfer a phone number to a new SIM card (a shift for which there are a variety of legitimate reasons), giving an attacker control over communications going to and from that number – like a second authentication factor.

That didn't matter, of course, because the SEC also admitted it disabled multi-factor authentication with Twitter support in July last year "due to issues accessing the account," but no one bothered to turn it back on.

"It made security too hard and then we forgot all about it" is an excuse that I suspect that SEC investigators wouldn't accept.  Top. Men.

Quote of the Day - Gun Control edition

This seems on-point for talking to gun controllers: a comment at Althouse:

Consider the white supremecy of keeping guns "off the streets." I've never seen a gun lying on "the streets." Seems like "the streets" is just a euphemism for some kind of people. But what kind of people do "the streets" describe?

White supremecy only matters when they say it matters. Which is the ultimate privilege when you think about it. You can just flip your concern switch off and on when it suits you.

Vince Gill - One More Last Chance

So some Covid Karen tells us we all need to forgive and forget about the damage, deaths, and pain inflicted by the Covid lockdowns.  Lots of folks are talking about this - I particularly like Aesop's. Better people than I have written eloquently about the death and destruction, and about how forgiveness requires repentance.  I really don't have anything more to add about that, either.

But one thing struck me about Karen's (actually Brown University Economist Emily Oster) article.  Specifically, this:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

Whoa, slow down Cowpoke.  There wasn't any luck involved at all.  Case in point, Borepatch, March 22, 2020 - a week after lockdowns were imposed:

There are three very interesting Coronavirus narratives emerging in just the last day or two:

1. The virus looks to be less bad - and perhaps much less bad - than we had feared.  As we learn more, we learn that the worst case scenario that had been put forward is much less likely.
2. Government actions have been a factor in making the outbreak or response worse or of using the outbreak to cover up their failures.
3. The government response is strangling the economy.  By their own admission (i.e. bills being discussed in Congress), there is at least a Trillion dollars of damage so far.

So look at this situation: things are not as bad as we feared, governments are to some extent demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy, and the draconian crackdown/overreaction is destroying businesses, jobs, and people's lives.

Man, I sure was lucky in that analysis, wasn't I?  But I guess that I'm particularly lucky because a month later I wrote this:

Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway.  Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.

But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences.  Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:

And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.

Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.

But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.

Man, that's two in a row for Borepatch!  How lucky can you get?  But wait - there's more!  Posted here September 3, 2020:

A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.

Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.

Bold in original.  That's some medical response, right there.

In all honesty, this really isn't controversial at all.  We've studied the health effects of unemployment for decades and decades.  We know what happened to employment, and how many people lost their jobs.  Applying known health impacts to those people allows us to quantify mortality due to the lockdown.  It's just math.

What is interesting here is the analysis of age at death.  For virtually all (90%) of Covid deaths, the patient was very old.  This means that there were few "life years" left for that patient.  However, for unemployment caused mortality the age at death was much younger, and so there were many more years for each of these people.

The process of higher mathematics gives the result that is in boldface in the quote.

It's hard to see a more counter productive government response.

Man, I must be the luckiest man on the face of the earth, stringing these analyses and predictions together like that.  I'd better buy a Powerball ticket for tonight!  [/snark]

So what is it that makes me so much smarter than a Brown University Professor?  I wrote about this in the April post linked above, specifically:

Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again.  Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future?  To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people?  Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months?  Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months?  That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.

It's the Unseen.  And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor.  That it is Unseen is not by accident.

And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation.  Of course the resulting public policy is hideous.  Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference).  You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine.  No doubt this is all a coincidence.

Even a private University like Brown cannot exist without the generous support of the Government.  Professor Oster has a financial incentive to follow the government with respect to this policy, and when a person's dinner depends upon their support for a particular policy they tend not to see any evidence that runs counter to that policy.

Oh, and no doubt Professor Oster did just fine during the lockdowns while working class people in Providence lost their businesses.  No doubt this was all a coincidence, too.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

Point of order, Professor Oster: it wasn't the pandemic that caused all this damage.  Rather, it was the government imposed lockdowns (supported by "experts" such as yourself) that did.  Some of us called this very, very early: April 21, 2020 to be specific:

There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore.  We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown).  Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed.

We knew this from the very beginning, but dim-bulb "Experts" like Professor Oster got this public policy wrong all the time.  They got it was catastrophically wrong. Yet somehow the "experts" keep wanting another chance to get things catastrophically wrong again.  And again.  And again.

Professor Oster wants us to give these same "experts" one more last chance.  There's a Country music song about that.

(Best country music cameo ever)

One More Last Chance (Songwriters: Vince Gill, Gary Nicholson)

She was standing at the front door
When I came home last night
A good book in her left hand
And a rollin' pin in the right
She said you've come home for the last time
With whiskey on your breath
If you don't listen to my preachin' boy
I'm goin' to have to beat you half to death

Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

First she hid my glasses
'Cause she knows that I can't see
She said you ain't goin' nowhere boy
'Til you spend a little time with me
Then the boys called from the honky tonk
Said there's a party goin' on down here
Well she might've took my car keys
But she forgot about my old John Deere

So give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

It's not easy being green

Wind energy company fined $35M for killing hundreds of bald eagles:

An American wind energy company has admitted to killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles, most of which were fatally struck by wind turbine blades, federal prosecutors said. 

ESI Energy pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) after eagles died at three of its facilities in Wyoming and New Mexico, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Nice going, Greens.  If the rest of us even pick up an Eagle feather from the ground we can go to prison, but your corporate buddies just cop a plea and, the cost to electricity rates, and go back to collecting their subsidies.

I'll believe that the Greens are serious when they insist on prison time for this sort of thing.

(via)

It's time for some Common Sense Media Control laws

So the Highland Park shooter recorded rap songs about doing a mass shooting.  Gosh, why would he rap about that?  Could it be all the media coverage about mass shootings?  Could he be motivated by the chance to be famous?

Every time there's a mass shooting, the media carpet bombs the airwaves with coverage.  It's easy to see why they do so - if it bleeds, it leads and all that.  It's about ratings, which means that they're in it for the money.

The Supreme Court has been clear that commercial speech has less First Amendment protection than political speech.  And we're constantly reminded by the liberals in every Second Amendment case that "no right is absolute".  Well, allrightee then.

It's high time to restrict the ability of the media to report on mass shooting events, because they are clearly encouraging this sort of behavior.  Some Common Sense restrictions seem to be pas due here.  For example:

• Waiting periods before publishing, to discourage "copy cat" killers.  A 1 or 2 week wait will allow information to get out to the public but will provide a "cooling off" period.
• A one story a month limit on stories will allow publishing the story to the public but will prevent the saturation of the airwaves that leads to copy cat events.  I mean, nobody needs an arsenal 24x7 never ending wave of stories.
• Licensing of news media, to include showing of "Good and Substantial" reason for publishing.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  I mean, no right is absolute - especially when it's not political speech but rather commercial speech.

Feel free to leave your suggestions for Common Sense Media Control laws in the comments.

When do The Powers That Be respect International Law, and when do they not?

It seems that one of Trump's Defense Secretaries has a new "tell all" book coming out, and in it he talks about how Trump wanted to bomb the drug cartels in Mexico and how awful that was.

I mean, what a shocking, awful, disgraceful violation of International Law - sending an attack into the territory of a sovereign ally.  Unthinkable!  I mean, he probably wouldn't have even let the government know he was going to attack!

Sort of like this:

That's Barack Obama his own self, saying that he basically knew he was violating International Law, for good reasons.  And what was the reason?  3,000 dead Americans, and the Pakistani government unwilling or unable to do anything about the perpetrators on their soil.

So what was Trump's reason?  Oh, wait:

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.

So Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and was killed ten years later.  That's 300 a year, or about one a day.  The cartels kill 100,000 each year, or about 275 Americans a day.  But it was awesome that Obama violated International Law and it's The Worst Thing Ever that Trump even thought about it.

It makes you suspect that all this pious bloviating from the "Elites" is a bunch of hooey.  And it makes you wonder if they think that 275 people from Youngstown, Ohio and similar places in the hollowed out "Fly Over" America are less valuable (and less worthy of protection) than one person working high finance in the World Trade Center.

Actually, I don't wonder at all.  It does make me wonder if J.D. Vance is right: "If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?..."

Man, Trump sure hired a bunch of snakes in the grass.

Don't ever change, National Review

National Review, 2016:

National Review, 2021: Something is wrong with the President.

By "President" they mean Joe Biden, natch.  Sorry, neocons - your should have known than there was an expiration date when you started hanging with the Cool Progressive Kidz.  Sorry for your luck and all your broken Middle East War dreams ...

Why voting no longer matters

You look at the destructive policies that are being put in place and wonder what on earth the left is up to.  Places that have the most "progressive" governments are instituting profoundly anti-progressive policies, like eliminating advanced math courses in public schools, or eliminating charter schools.  Both of these benefit middle class or working class students - the elites, of course, send their kids to private schools.  You could as easily use the example of unions losing good paying jobs when pipelines and oil drilling permits are canceled.

So what gives?  I mean, it's obvious that these policies are destructive to income equality.  J.Kb has a very interesting angle on what is driving the insanity:

The elites love, above all else, having things and access to things that regular people don’t ...

The point of buying shit like that is the knowledge that people who didn’t go to the right finishing schools and then to Harvard and then do a brokerage firm on Wall Street can’t buy that stuff.

Moreover, what the elite hate more than anything else is that so much of what they had we can have too.

...

Cellphones and laptops used to be status symbols of the elite.  Think about Gordon Gekko in Wall Street talking on his cellphone in 1987.  By 1997, every middle-class businessman in Miami had a cellphone.  By 2007, cellphones were so ubiquitous that high school kids had cell phones, new homebuyers had given up landlines, and payphones were removed from public places.

Technology had democratized luxury and the elite couldn’t stand it.

Since then, the desire has been not just to own more but to make the rest of us own less ... 

That doesn’t apply to the elite, just to us.

Now add Kurt Schlicter's insight about anti-Trumpism:

The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.

He drew back the curtain so that everyone could see that the "elites" were anything but elite.  They cannot ever forgive him for that, and thus the rage.

Putting these together, we can see that the elites are furious at the idea that someone could challenge their authority, and determined that this will never happen again.  This is why these anti-progressive policies are being implemented everywhere: it's to tell the "non-elites" that they need to keep their place, or else.  Every Trump voter will be punished, to make sure a Trumpist rebellion never occurs again.  The punishments will be crude, and the cruder the better - to drive home the point of who's on top and who isn't (and won't ever be).

Back in November, I posted about the surprising crudeness of the election fraud:

What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities.  This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.

Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact.  He was struck by how crude it was:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it.  It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington.  It's showing who's up and who's down.

The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.

The elites are determined that their opponents will be humiliated and impoverished forever.  Never again will they be laughed at by the unwashed masses.  Never again will the masses aspire to the elite's station.  The elites don't mind the masses hating them so long as they fear them.

That's why there will never be a free and fair election in the country again, at least if the elites get their way.

Damn. How did we bomb a hospital in the Middle East?

Oh, wait:

Okay, never mind.  After all, the Press doesn't mind - when it's a hospital bombed by Democrats ...

Boy, it sure would be awful if a President bombed Iraq right before an Impeachment vote

pic.twitter.com/oyGBbhkLWa

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) January 3, 2020

It seems that Eric Holder is back in the news

He put himself in the limelight with a bold assertion:

Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the United States, former political hack for boss man Barack Obama, penned a scathing piece in The Washington Post against today Attorney General William Barr, calling him, get this, hold the phone, grab a seat and take a breath — “nakedly partisan.”

Well allrightee, then.

The linked article does a great job skewering Holder's nonsense, but only briefly mentions what got Holder held in Contempt (the first Cabinet Secretary in the Republic's history to be so held) - the "Fast and Furious" gun running operation that got Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry shot.

Well, not everyone has forgotten Fast And Furious.  Ammo.com has a great overview of that whole fiasco that is worth a read.

Me, I think that this is a sign that the investigation is showing signs of closing in on Obama himself.  The noise that you hear is the Palace Guard is closing ranks to protect The One.  It's the kicked dog that yelps.

Is this a Global Crisis?

Then maybe we should consult with a child activist on what to do.

Or maybe not ...

You want a hero?

Offered without comment"

Nike can suck it.

Both sides are not equally at fault in the gun control debate

It's not often that I disagree with Peter, but this just isn't right:

What is "true" is what conforms to how they think the world should be - whether or not the world really is that way.  If it's not the way they want the world to be then, even if it's factually true, it's not "the truth" - which, of course, only they possess.

You can see that right now in the clamor for more gun control in the wake of the three mass shootings last week.  Factual discussion of whether or not their proposals will actually work is neither here nor there - in fact, it's a waste of time.  The extremists on both sides - those who want more gun control, and those who insist that not one more gun law is acceptable - all want it their way, and they want it now, and they refuse to even consider any alternative.

The moonbats on the left are as guilty of this as the wingnuts on the right.

This isn't remotely right.  The claim of moral equivalence simply doesn't fit, for two reasons:

1. Gun controllers are trying to take rights away from gun owners.  Gun owners are simply trying not to lose their existing rights.  Morally, these are entirely different categories.

2. Gun controllers have a long and sordid history of pushing lies to further their goals.  The government agencies charged with enforcing the laws as written have a long and sordid history of blatantly breaking those laws.  Gun owners are likely the most law abiding group of citizens you can find, although that may be breaking down (very large majorities of gun owners in New York and New Jersey have simply refused to register their AR pattern rifles).

One group simply wants to be left alone.  The other uses falsehoods, misrepresentations, hiding contrary facts, and lawlessness by the Organs of the State.  There's no moral equivalence between these groups.  None.

No more gun control laws, period.  The "Universal Background Check" law will lead to backdoor registration, even with the Organs Of The State saying that they won't build a database for sure you guys.  "Red Flag" laws will be weaponized by Antifa and the thugs on the left to disarm their political opponents - and these kooks see half (or two thirds?) of the country as their opponents.  No "Assault Rifle" ban - even the Department of Justice said that the 1994 one didn't keep anyone from (legally) buying one, and they also said that the law had absolutely no impact on crime rates.

How's this for a crazy idea?  How about the government starts enforcing the existing laws on the books?  How about the Air Force starts updating the background check database when they dishonorably discharge someone?  How about the Broward Sheriff's Department figures out that after a couple dozen complaints about a violent student, they send him for a psych exam?  How about the school does this once they expel him, rather than readmit him?  The list of failures by public servants - and the butcher's bill that goes with that - is long indeed.  It's a waste of time to add another law that the Powers That Be will ignore - but which will be used against law abiding citizens, sure as God made little green apples.

And so I'm afraid that I can't agree with Peter on this.  I'm not remotely like the folks on the other side of the debate.  They're on the attack, and it's a dishonest attack.  I'm just sticking up for my rights against that dishonest attack.  I will not consider any "alternatives", because there are no honest alternatives on offer - only more lies and fakes.  No more gun control laws, ever.

German Greens fighting new "green" power projects

Last week I posted about how wind farms are decimating wildlife, from insects to bats to birds to eagles, because environmentalists are ignoring the problem.  It seems that this is not true in Germany, of all places:

The expansion of wind power in the first half of this year collapsed to its lowest level since the introduction of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) in 2000. All in all, just 35 wind turbines were build with an output of 231 megawatts. “This corresponds to a decline of 82 percent compared to the already weak period of the previous year”, according to the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) in Berlin.

“This makes one nearly speechless,” said Matthias Zelinger at the presentation of the data. The managing director of the Power Systems division of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) spoke of a “blow to the guts of the energy turnaround”. This actual development doesn’t match “at all to the current climate protection debate”.

...

The most important cause lies in the legal resistance of wildlife and forest conservationists fighting new wind farms. The BWE President referred to an industry survey of the onshore wind agency. According to its findings, more than 70 percent of the legal objections are based on species conservation, especially the threat to endangered bird species and bats.

Well done to the German environmentalists for holding to their principles.  I've been very hard on the environmental movement in the past, mostly because the rampant hypocrisy so often on display.  But not here.  Anyone who loves the outdoors can applaud this victory, whether you believe in man made global warming or not.

And today is a twofer in non-hypocritical environmentalist news:

Greta Thunberg to sail Atlantic for climate conferences

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has accepted a ride across the Atlantic by boat to attend two key climate conferences.

The teenager will make the journey aboard the Malizia II, a high-speed 18-metre (60ft) yacht built to race around the globe.

“We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to New York in mid August,” she tweeted.

Thunberg refuses to fly because of the environmental impact of air travel.

Miss Thunberg is a bit of a social media sensation in Scandinavia.  She and I clearly disagree on whether mankind is causing the heat death of the planet, but good for her sticking to her principles.  She has chosen a very inconvenient (and quite frankly pretty uncomfortable) alternative transportation mode to keep from being a hypocrite on the subject.  In this she is seemingly unique among all the world's climate activists - none of them have given up jet travel to climate conferences.  Thunberg is showing everyone that it really isn't easy being Green, but being Green is exactly what she is being.

And a little child shall lead them.

- Isaiah 11:6

Bravo to Miss Thunberg.  The kids are all right.  Maybe wrong, but all right.

"Green" energy is destroying the environment

Windmills kill far more wildlife than has been previously reported:

“There is strong evidence that many insect populations are under serious threat and are declining in many places across the globe,” notes Extinction Rebellion. “A 27-year long population monitoring study in Germany revealed a dramatic 76% decline in flying insect biomass.”

What Extinction Rebellion does not mention is that scientists in Germany say wind turbines appear to be contributing significantly to what it calls the “insect die-off.”

Germany’s leading technology assessment research institute published a study last October concluding that the rapid expansion of wind farms threatens insect populations.

Dr. Franz Trieb of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics concludes that a "rough but conservative estimate of the impact of wind farms on flying insects in Germany" is a “loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year” which “could be relevant for population stability.”

It seems that this hammer of Green Doom falls most strongly on migrating insect populations (i.e. kills breeding populations).  OK, but it's just insects, right?

“Wind energy facilities kill a significant number of bats far exceeding any documented natural or human-caused sources of mortality in the affected species,” writes Cryan.

Cryan is emphatic on this point. “There are no other well-documented threats to populations of migratory tree bats that cause mortality of similar magnitude to that observed at wind turbines.”  

Another leading bat expert, Patricia Brown, agrees. More than a decade ago she warned California energy regulators that wind turbines could be the “nail in the coffin” for some migratory bat species.

But bats are icky, right.  No biggie.

Wind turbines have also emerged as one of the greatest human threats to many species of large, threatened and high-conservation value birds, after habitat loss from agriculture. 

Wind energy threatens golden eagles, bald eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks, Swainson’s hawks, American kestrels, white-tailed kites, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons, among many others. 

The expansion of wind turbines could result in the extinction of the golden eagle in the western United States, where its population is at an unsustainably low level. 

Any additional mortalities to the golden eagle threatens the species with extinction, scientists with US Fish and Wildlife warned 10 years ago, before the last decade’s massive expansion of wind farms.

Oh, damnitall.  How come we haven't been hearing this?

Aren’t bats protected from wind turbines by government agencies enforcing the Endangered Species Act and other conservation laws? They're not.

“None of the migratory bats known to be most affected by wind turbines are protected by conservation laws,” writes Cryan, “nor is there a legal mandate driving research into the problem or implementation of potential solutions.” 

No research funding?  Hmmmm.

Where government agencies routinely require permits for development near wetlands, in order to protect bird species, they rarely require the same for wind farms, even though the wildlife impacts can be far greater.   

Nor do governments require that wind developers disclose when they kill birds and bats, or count the dead. Wind developers have even sued to prevent the public from accessing data about bird kills.  

Incredibly, wind developers are allowed to self-report violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

The data are self-reported by interested parties, not by scientists?  Hmmmm.

Environmental journalists deserve a significant amount of blame for suggesting the problem is either small or has been solved. “Wind farm works to reduce eagle deaths from old turbines,” reads the headline of a PBS Newshour story that typifies journalistic bias.  

But greater responsibility for the threatened extinction of birds and bats lies with environmentalists who promote wind energy as good for the environment.  

Against the best-available science, Sierra Club claims that “the toll from turbines is far from a major cause of bird mortality.” 

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently endorsed a massive expansion of wind turbines on the Great Lakes against the opposition from local wildlife experts, birders, and conservationists, who note that the lakes are one of the world’s most important sanctuaries to many migratory bird species.

Environmentalists sweeping environmental impacts under the rug?  Hmmmm.

What gives with all this?  These people are acting in precisely the opposite manner than you would expect.  Why?



Remember this commercial?  It used to be on the Sunday talking heads shows in the 1990s.  That's T. Boone Pickens, modern industrial Robber Barron.  Why is he pushing wind power, which is a lot more expensive than goal or gas.  What's his deal?  Why was he pushing wind power so much?

Subsidies:

It gets lots more complicated when you consider that the wind farms are being subsidized by the government with the Production Tax Credit (PTC). A tax credit should not be confused with a tax deduction. A deduction reduces the amount of income you pay taxes on. is paying taxes on. A credit is money back. And the PTC is a “Refundable Tax Credit” which means the company does not just get to pay fewer taxes but actually gets paid by the government even if it does not owe any taxes.

The PTC subsidy has been in effect now for 27 years. Congress has adjusted the PTC many times through the years but today the subsidy is about $.02/kWhr. So, the power company gets money back in the form of a subsidy for roughly 67% of what they produce – i.e., the company gets money back to the tune of $.02/kWhr after it sells the electricity for $.03/kWhr. If the company sells $3 million of electricity they get the $3 million plus a PTC subsidy of $2 million. That is a huge subsidy! In fact, I think it is the biggest subsidy ever given for anything.

T. Boone Pickens and Warren Buffett both have huge investments in these things and both have openly said that wind farms would not be economic without the PTC.

(There's a lot of information at that link and you should definitely RTWT.  It's actually much worse than this)

So the Robber Barons are driven by fithy lucre, in the form of sweet, sweet "green" subsidies which inflate the value of the investment by 2/3.  What are the chances that Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club get a lot of donations from corporate foundations?

Hmmmm.  At this point I'm thinking about how Lenin called liberal supporters "Useful Idiots" and thinking about the rank and file environmentalists.  Most of these folks seem like people, and not the sort to be used as tools by the likes of T. Boone Pickens.

Hmmmm.  It's not easy being green.

Note: the picture of the dead eagle is from savetheeaglesinternational.org.  They have a lot more about this.

Snerk