Sunday, March 31, 2024
Modernity Juice
That Obama and Kennedy — both of whom went to Harvard — are claiming that a super-high-energy density substance that can be deployed for innumerable purposes, from pumping well water in Kenya to emergency generation of electricity in Lower Manhattan, is somehow bad or even yet, tyrannical, is nonsense on stilts. Rather than talk about the tyranny of oil, the two Harvard grads might as well be complaining about the tyranny of physics. Or better yet, the tyranny of density.And John Hinderaker:
Few substances this side of uranium come close to touching oil when it comes to the essential measure of energy density: the amount of energy (which is measured in joules or BTUs) that can be contained in a given volume or mass. In addition to petroleum’s high energy density, it is stable at standard temperature and pressure, relatively cheap, easily transported, and can be used for everything from making shoelaces to fueling jumbo jets.
Petroleum drives modern economies, which is to say that it enables modern life. But for petroleum, we would be going around in donkey carts. And not going very far. America’s need for oil is insatiable; nothing can dent it, even temporarily, but an economic downturn.
Coddling the Savages Update
This is what happens when you start a war. Hamas’s fighters hide within civilian infrastructure, hospitals being a notorious example, so naturally such infrastructure is damaged. And of course, it is Hamas that has the power to bring destruction and disease to an end by surrendering.And,
Again, no acknowledgment that Hamas started this war, and that Israel needs to attack Rafah because that is where many thousands of Hamas fighters have now congregated. Can the conflict be ended at this point? Sure, Hamas just needs to surrender. The idea that the hardship that Hamas has brought on its own people somehow requires Israel to accept defeat in the war is ridiculous.
It has become very clear that Biden's a lot more worried about Dearborn than about the survival of an ally under constant attack for almost two decades by a barbaric terrorist army. The White House has done nothing to demand our own hostages back, or to hold Hamas accountable for kidnapping them while murdering thirty-plus Americans on October 7. It's not the Israelis creating a 'perception of daylight,' but Biden and the rest of the Kabul Bug-Out authors making sure everyone sees the 'daylight' they're creating from Israel.Ed Morrissey:
Make no mistake about the message sent by the UN Security Council. It just voted to vindicate terrorism, human-shield strategies, and hostaging in a breathtaking contradiction to the norms of conflict. Hamas initiated hostilities with the most barbaric large-scale terrorist attack, conducting a planned operation of mass rapes, murders, pillaging, and kidnappings aimed at non-combatants. Rather than demand the return of those kidnapped and a surrender of war criminals as a condition of a cease-fire, the United Nations has instead put the onus on the aggrieved party to stop fighting a war it didn't start in the first place.John Hinderaker:
These international students, the large majority from countries with little freedom of speech and little or no tradition of academic freedom, are the shock troops of anti-Semitism. True, they bring some leftist students along with them. But the most anti-Semitic universities, like Harvard, Penn and MIT, are also the ones with the most foreign students from anti-Semitic countries. This was illustrated by the fact that when violently anti-Semitic students assaulted Jewish students at MIT, isolating them in the library and trying to break down the doors to get at them, MIT declined to expel the anti-Semitic thugs. Why? For fear that they would be deported.
The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”
Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.
Via Scott Johnson.
I have some bad news for Osama Hamdan. This is a war and it's a war that Hamas started. You don't surrender in a war when you are winning. Bibi Netanyahu has been clear about that from the first day of the counteroffensive. Hamas can either surrender en masse or be destroyed. And if that means that Gaza has to be smashed until there are no two stones left standing one atop the other, so be it. If Israel were to evacuate at this point, Hamas would simply start recruiting and rebuilding and they would go back to launching terror attacks against Israel with the full backing of Iran.
It's fairly obvious that Hamas wouldn't even be bothering with these sham negotiations if they didn't offer the chance to buy some time. The terror group is counting on international pressure on Israel and the United States to eventually force Bibi to relent and pull back. Sadly, much of the international press and pro-Hamas activists in America and at the UN are playing into that strategy right on cue. But at least for the time being, Netanyahu is standing strong and refusing to back down.
This emphasizes a truth about warfare, asymmetrical and otherwise, that keeps getting lost in this conflict in particular. And that truth is: War is hell. That's why people shouldn't start wars, but it's also why wars have to be fought to their conclusion, which is either capitulation or collapse, when the aggressor is determined to annihilate the other through war. Until the full "price" of war is felt by the people who start them, then they will keep starting them as long as they remain in the grip of their annihilationist fantasies. Only when it becomes clear that such wars will result in total destruction short of capitulation will the disincentives against war work properly.
Why 40 hostages? Why not all of them? Why should Israel even discuss a proposal that does not include a total release of kidnap victims? And how about a Hamas surrender? Normally, when a country starts a war and then loses it, if it wants the fighting to stop it has to surrender. It is bizarre that some people take seriously the idea that Hamas should survive the war it foolishly started.
Realized Stupidity
This is really just a wealth tax, something that progressives like Elizabeth Warren have been pushing for years. Also, the White House claim that wealthy Americans pay an average income tax rate of 8 percent is a lie which Biden has been telling since 2021. I wrote about it here but the short version is that the 8% is an estimate based on increased wealth and unrealized gains, not on income. In other words, this is an imaginary tax system that does not exist in the US.Also,
Paying more than the bottom 70% is what Democrats call "not paying their fair share." In any case, Biden's claim about billionaires paying an 8% rate is a lie which he has been repeated for three years despite fact checks from every major news outlet pointing out that this is very misleading. In all, he's made this dishonest claim more than 30 times.
If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.
War on the Pillars of Civilization Update
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
Data centers—like manufacturing plants—require reliable power around the clock year-round, which wind and solar don’t provide. Businesses can’t afford to wait for batteries to become cost-effective. Building transmission lines to connect distant renewables to the grid typically takes 10 to 12 years.
Because of these challenges, Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Via Steven Hayward.
In any case, this figure shows how the U.S. abandoned nuclear power. Imagine how much lower our carbon footprint would be if we had kept up the pace of the 1950-1990 period. (Keep in mind that the plants that came online in the mid-1980s were begun 10 to 15 years before.)
This film, Climate The Movie, directed by Martin Durkin, features a number of the world’s leading experts on “climate change.” It does a good job of laying out some of the basic data that show the scientific falsity of global warming hysteria. If you have been following the issue, most of this material will not be new to you. But the film goes on from there to expose the evil motives behind “green” dogma, and the evil consequences of climate bullying. By the time the film is over, you should be not only better informed, but angry.
Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
The companies are heavily subsidizing EVs with profits from gas-powered cars. This means middle-class Americans in Fargo are paying more for gas-powered cars so the affluent in Napa Valley can buy cheaper EVs. This cost-shift won’t be financially sustainable as the Biden mandate ramps up, and it may not be politically sustainable either.
Via Scott Johnson.
Liberals are convinced that when markets tell you that people don't want something the solution is always to force them to do it anyway, and that is the intent of the upcoming regulations.
The government already literally pays people thousands of dollars to buy EVs, and even with that incentive, people are balking. EVs are just not ready for Prime Time, and may never be. Billions of dollars are being spent on building chargers, and the results have been dismal.
If you’ve wondered how liberals expect you to heat your house after they have outlawed fossil fuels, the short answer is heat pumps. Heat pumps have joined “batteries” as the all-purpose “green” solution. But in reality, they are no solution at all.
Renewable advocates often claim that the adoption of more wind and solar will lead to lower electricity costs, but the opposite is true. In a previous Substack, we wrote in detail about how utility companies with the largest rate increase requests in the country admit the energy transition is a major reason behind increasing electricity prices for families and businesses. But we are not the only ones reporting this.
Politico recently ran a story that highlights rising electricity costs in California, how they are due to the state’s climate policies, and how residents are becoming fed up with being asked to pony up more money for a failing energy transition. Indeed, the rising cost of electricity that stems from overbuilding tends to result in unhappy electricity ratepayers.
This is a major issue to discuss.
How is it that renewable advocates are so wrong about electricity cost increases stemming from massive wind and solar buildouts? The answer lies in relying on fundamentally flawed means of comparison between different electricity sources and the lack of accounting for the diminished value that wind and solar offer the grid compared to more reliable energy sources like coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
In other words, the framework they use for determining electricity prices is wrong because they don’t account for the full system costs of maintaining reliability.
The bottom line is that a transition from reliable and affordable fossil fuels to unreliable and prohibitively expensive weather-dependent sources of energy would be a human disaster, and therefore, it isn’t going to happen. Ever. Leftists may whine and gnash their teeth, and for now they may reap enormous amounts of ill-gotten money from “green” interests. But what they want, or more likely pretend to want, isn’t possible, and it won’t happen.
You might think that cutting down trees in the southern U.S., thus preventing them from absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere—do they still teach junior high kids about photosynthesis?—shipping them to Europe on diesel-powered ships, and then burning them, releasing carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, must be the dumbest possible way of generating electricity. And, while it is appallingly stupid, and not “green” in any coherent sense, it is arguably not as dumb as wind and solar.
Yes: burning wood on an industrial scale is idiotic, but at least it works in the dark and when the wind isn’t blowing.
Fire Them All
Some final thoughts: Strategically speaking, you’d think that woke academics would keep their heads down until the Harvard-Hamas-plagiarism scandals faded away, especially in a purple state like Virginia with a Republican governor. My best explanation for their strategic missteps: They’re in such an airtight echo chamber that they can’t fathom how negatively the non-academic world sees them.
This is quixotic, I know, but let me try to break through the woke academic echo chamber with some harsh truths. If you promote DEI for a living, the reality is that normal, apolitical people see you as a racist, sexist, censorious fanatic. They don’t say so publicly … because they are afraid of you. They don’t tell you privately … because they are afraid of you. But when they’re speaking to people they trust, they vehemently disagree with you—and yearn to see you all fired.
Contrary to woke dogma, racism does not mean “prejudice plus power.” Yet the phrase still nicely captures what normal, apolitical people detest about DEI promoters. Namely: DEI promoters are exemplars of powerful, prejudiced people. After all, they get paid to make baseless accusations of moral failing against their co-workers—day in, day out. If you work in DEI and want to see people who need to learn about the just treatment of others, spare us another self-righteous lecture and look in the mirror.
Via Steven Hayward.
Bribing Biden
I think Republicans have made a mistake in seeming to go along with the Democrats’ theme that money has to be traced to Joe’s bank accounts in order to count. Under federal bribery law, Biden is guilty if he “demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value” not just for himself, but for “any other person or entity” in return for “being influenced in the performance of any official act.” People who bribe politicians are rarely dumb enough to make checks payable to the politicians themselves. Most often, they go to family members.
Republicans also shouldn’t fall for the Democrats’ spin about Joe not being involved in “his son’s overseas business dealings.” So, what business was Hunter in? Did he own or run a company that produced any products or provided any services? No. Hunter’s only business was peddling Joe’s influence. And for that to work, it had to be plausible that Joe was in on the deal, and would use his influence to benefit CEFC, or whoever. This is why Hunter would bring his father in on the telephone when he was meeting with Joe’s customers.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Green = Black
It is extraordinary that no one in any country has actually tried, seriously, to figure out how to power a modern economy with intermittent and absurdly expensive wind and solar power. We are simply cruising toward disaster with inept and even senile politicians at the helm.
Accessory to Murder
Ibarra is one of millions of illegals whom Joe Biden has deliberately welcomed into the United States, in violation of federal law, the Constitution, and Biden’s oath of office. Biden’s motives are hard to understand. But in the law, one is held to have intended the natural and inevitable consequences of one’s actions. Occam’s Razor, like the common law, implies that Biden is trying to bring chaos and destruction to the United States.
Discipline is Racist
The underlying concept here is that disproportionate rates of discipline are proof [of] a failure by the school not by students (or their parents). What's not considered a possibility in this document is that black and Native American students are suspended or referred for discipline more often because they misbehave in class more often. Even if that's true, the solution is more attention to their "trauma" which in plain language means giving students a pass on their behavior because they are black (or gay or trans, etc.).
The practical result of this is going to be a two-tiered system in which black and Native American students get a pass for behavior that white and Asian students could never get away with. That discrepancy will be noticed by students, some of whom will take advantage of it and others of whom will feel resentful about it. The proper response here is to demand the same behavior from all students and to suspend those who fail to meet that single standard regardless of race or sexual orientation. But I can't say I'm confident that the Biden Dept. of Education will reach the same conclusion.
But We Need New Gun Laws
This lack of concern on the part of Gooden demonstrates that laws alone will not prevent violence — it’s the follow-through in holding accountable criminal offenders who possess and use firearms in the commission of crime that matters. Criminals should be terrified of the penalties that await them if they choose to possess or use firearms. Our court system’s current feeble response to criminals possessing or using firearms in the commission of crimes does not deter criminals from doing so.
Via John Hinderaker.
The Nazi Savages Can Surrender
But it does remind us that the "humanitarian" issues are the responsibility of the party that started the war and has fought it while embedding in civilian population centers and facilities. If they want an end to the war they started, they can offer a formal capitulation and submission to the victorious party -- just like Germany and Japan did in 1945.
Hamas won't do that, of course. So it's up to the Gazans who put Hamas in charge to decide which they prefer: being the battleground for Hamas' war, or getting rid of Hamas themselves and capitulating to the IDF. The clock is ticking.
Powered by Corruption
Wind and solar energy are scams that are kept alive only by government corruption. To the extent you scale back the corruption, they disappear.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Obvious Evil
So the question naturally arises: why should the United States have anything to do with the U.N.? I understand why Russia wants the U.N. to exist, and why the 57 Islamic countries that dominate the General Assembly want it to exist, and why evil regimes like Iran’s that gain political cover by being appointed to the U.N’s Human Rights Council want it to exist, and why tiny third-world countries that are hard to find on a map, but get equal votes in the General Assembly, want it to exist. But why should we want the U.N. to exist? Why should we support it?
I don’t think there is a good answer to that question. The U.N. purports to have moral authority superior to ours, but that is a lie. The U.N. has no moral authority at all; certainly less than that of the United States. The U.N. does obvious evil in the world, and I can’t see any substantial good to outweigh that evil. If there are specific agencies of the U.N. that actually do something productive, they could easily be reproduced in a post-U.N. world.
Savage Apparel
Anyone who shows up to work at the Pentagon or State Department wearing a keffiyeh scarf should be summarily fired. Would FDR have tolerated a federal employee who wore a Swastika to the office?
America's Back!
The Biden decision to cut off new LNG export facilities is a big win for Russia, which has already seen its exports recover after a significant dip due to Europe seeking other sources—particularly the United States. Biden helps Russia, harms Europe, and delivers a blow to American jobs—especially in Red states.
Oops. I am sure everybody involved is thrilled by Biden’s decision.
To put the icing on the cake, Russia is also a major coal exporter, and coal is an alternative to natural gas for electricity production. Germany is already firing up its coal plants—even tearing down a wind farm to open a coal mine. Biden’s decision will likely increase prices for natural gas outside the US.
Last I checked, coal emits far more CO2 than natural gas. Geez.
Indigenous Math
CNN wants you to know that Australians should be angry that Australia exists because the indigenous peoples lost their continent to the colonizers.
I looked it up, and there may have been as few as 300,000 and as many as a million and a half aborigines who lived on the continent, which is approximately the size of the United States. It is possible that the total reached as high as 3 million at one point, although that is a very high estimate.
To put that into perspective, 300,000 illegal aliens entered the United States in December alone. Not including the “gotaways.”
In other words, CNN thinks that adding a few million White people to a continent the size of the US is appalling because 300,000 people should own an entire continent. But 300,000 people is also insignificant enough a population that it is no big deal that the same number of people invaded the US in a single month.
Energy Triumvirate
Cost, scale, and density are the three main points of any good energy analysis (I call these the “Energy Triumvirate”), and is what I drill students about from the first day of class to the last day of class. A lot of current energy enthusiasms, like solar and wind power—not to mention batteries for cars and the grid—are hugely resource intensive, which makes their tradeoffs over fossil fuels far from a slam dunk, as we have mentioned here many times in the past.
Laws of Physics Still Not Repealed
What’s being observed in Chicago and other places is that the EV batteries in many models lose up to 20 percent of their charging capacity when the thermometer falls below the freezing point. If the car’s heater is running on full blast (as you might expect in such weather), the capacity can drop by more than 40%. And that means the available range you can drive is reduced by that much as well, so you need to plan your trip around where the next charging station is.
Even if you manage to find one, you will further need to hope that it’s not backed up by frustrated drivers like the one mentioned in the linked report. Wait times of up to two hours were encountered and the cars were charging much more slowly than usual. At the Chicago charging station mentioned above, multiple vehicles wound up having to be hauled away by tow trucks. All of the waiting around was made all the more miserable by the frigid winds and snow.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Degenerate Animals and Garbage People
It’s as if these people are a bunch of degenerate animals, which is because that’s what they are. Hamas and the — majority — of Palestinians who support them. And their western supporters — including the Western feminists who went crazy about a fictional frat-house rape that left its “victim” alive and unscarred — are utterly complicit as well.And, from John Hinderaker:
And we’re supposed to pretend somehow that these degenerate animals aren’t degenerate animals because of a bullshit Cultural Marxist theory created by people whose goal was always to undermine Western civilization and replace it with something that looks a lot like a cross between Hamas and Stalin. Garbage ideas from garbage people who deserve to be treated like the garbage that they are, but that are instead amplified and legitimized by our academic/media/political complex, which is itself no better. It is important to make that truth utterly clear and to repeat it and throw it in their faces.
Upon re-reading this post, I realize that I may have inadvertently maligned the animal kingdom. To be clear, there is no animal species, no predator, anywhere near as cruel, as heartless, as vicious, as ignorant, as the Muslims who carried out the atrocities of October 7—and the much larger number of Muslims and Western liberals in the press, at Harvard, Penn, MIT, etc., who cheered those atrocities. No animal species has sunk that low.
Hamas is a Symptom
What accounts for this savagery? The sick culture that prevails among the so-called Palestinians, and that especially dominates Gaza. The Gazans are lost in hate and have been trained to do evil from childhood. It is that culture that must be destroyed, not the political organization of Hamas, which is a symptom not a cause.
A number of commentators have written that the Israelis must not seek revenge for the atrocities of October 7. I don’t understand that. They absolutely should wreak vengeance on the Gazans. (“Everyone over there is a terrorist,” as one retrieved hostage says.) In my opinion, Israelis have a moral duty to avenge the Gazans’ atrocities. Happily, they seem to be well on their way to doing so.
A Christmas (Disinformation) Story
However, this is utter nonsense, not least because ‘Palestine’ did not exist at that time. At all. One would think that a Catholic priest would know the history of the region better than that. That name didn’t even come into being until about a century after the death of Christ, when the Romans put down the last of the Judean rebellions and drove many of the Hebrews from the region. That took place in 132 AD (or Common Era, if you prefer), 99 years after the Crucifixion. At that time, the Romans renamed Judea as Syria Palestina after combining it with Galilee, a name retained until the empire began its long collapse and withdrew from the region in 390 AD.
But even after the Romans renamed the region Syria Palestina, Jews maintained a significant population within it, although many more dispersed to other parts of the region. Christians emerged as a dominant population initially, first after the acceptance and endorsement of the Romans under Constantine, and later after the Roman retreat in 390. The area became more Christianized over the next couple of centuries through evangelization and other cultural phenomena rather than conquest, but Jews remained in the former Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Arabs, fueled by Islam, didn’t come in significant numbers for another couple of centuries after that — and even then, they didn’t identify themselves as “Palestinians” under the Roman rubric, which would have been unthinkable to them at the time.
Furthermore, while Bethlehem is today in the West Bank where ‘Palestinians’ want a state, that’s not where Mary or Joseph originated or lived before Jesus’ birth. They came from Nazareth, which not only wasn’t part of a mythical Palestine at that time, it’s not even part of the proposed Palestine today. Nazareth is within Israel proper and will remain so, regardless of any “two-state” settlement. Therefore, even if one accepts a backward projection of a modern claim to a period where the claimants’ ancestors wouldn’t control for another six or seven centuries, it’s very clear that Jesus would not have been a “Palestinian” at all, especially as the term is defined now. He was a Nazarene, a Judean, a Hebrew, and an Israeli in modern terms, and so were Mary and Joseph. And while Jesus and the Holy Family did flee Bethlehem as refugees into Egypt, they returned to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem after the death of Herod … which is again part of Israel, not part of a proposed “Palestine.”
None of this “parallels” our current world situation. Jesus was born under an occupation, but that’s because the Romans had occupied the land of the Jews. Today, the Jews have control of their own historic lands, having literally bought it from the peoples that had colonized it in the succeeding centuries, especially the Arabs, and then defended it in several wars in which Arabs invaded Israel in attempts to conquer and destroy it. Mizrahi Jews — natives of the region — comprise a majority of its population, thanks in large part to the ethnic cleansing of Arab and Persian nations in the first half of the 20th century and immediate post-independence period in the second half.
This argument is even more foolish than the “Jesus was an illegal immigrant” argument, and only slightly less silly than a claim by CNN’s Christopher Lamb (also flagged by Twitchy) that Jesus would have been born “in Gaza under rubble” today. Bethlehem was the city of David, the place where the prophets foretold that the Messiah would be born — and Bethlehem is nearly a hundred miles from the Gaza border. (Lamb had the good sense to delete his tweet after getting roundly criticized for it.)
The real message of Christmas has nothing do with any of these political questions. It has nothing to do with national or international relations. The real message of Christmas has to do with Christ bridging the gulf between the Lord and fallen humanity, and the forgiveness of sins and extension of the grace necessary for each of us to live in God’s eternal love. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something … and these days, that’s usually a progressive media narrative meant to distract from reality.
Unprecedented Stupidity
So good luck with “net zero” by 2050, or any other date. Environmentalists in the U.S. and Western Europe have succeeded in prematurely shuttering a number of coal plants, but that is virtually irrelevant. It is China and India, along with countries like Indonesia, that are driving the coal explosion.And,
The challenges are unprecedented because until now, no one has done anything as stupid as shutting down vast quantities of reliable electric power while having no plan [to] replace that capacity, on any timetable or at any cost. But that is where we are now. Given that U.S. emissions are essentially immaterial to global CO2 emissions, in view of what China, India, Indonesia and other countries have in progress, one can only question the motives of those who want to cripple our economy and our children’s futures with pointless “green” mandates.
The Myth of Innocent Gazan Civilians
The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.
But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we keep hearing about?
The Real Goal
What is the connection between these two seemingly unrelated topics, global warming and the conflict between Israel and Hamas? One might say that a person who is wrong about one thing (global warming) is likely to be wrong about another (Gaza). But Thunberg isn’t just wrong, she is a passionate advocate against fossil fuels and against Israel—and, more broadly, “settler colonialism.”And,
That is not a coincidence. Rather, it reflects the fact that the climate change movement in which Thunberg is so prominent actually has little or nothing to do with climate change. Rather, it is an attack on the West. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern civilization. They are the sole reason why we are not riding around in donkey carts and reading by candle light. Destroying fossil fuels means, at best, impoverishing the West.
That this is the activists’ real goal is evident from the fact that they train their fire not on China or India, but on the United States and Europe. If they were really concerned about the climate, this would make no sense, because China is by far the largest emitter of CO2.
If you aren’t talking about Chinese emissions, everything you are saying about global warming is a joke. And neither Greta Thunberg nor Al Gore, Joe Biden or John Kerry is saying anything about Chinese emissions. If they really believed their own hype about global warming as an existential threat, they would be talking about invading China or bombing the hundreds of new coal plants that it has under development. But they don’t do that; instead, they stick up for the Chinese Communists and say they are doing a pretty good job. So their real goal isn’t affecting the climate, it is destroying Western economies and, thus, Western power.
Likewise with Israel. Neither Greta Thunberg nor any of her left-wing allies has shown any interest in Middle Eastern conflicts that do not involve Israel. From the Iran-Iraq war to the Syrian civil war to the homicidal conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, they are uninvolved, no matter how many thousands of Arabs are killed. Only when Israel is a party—even when it is a party because of one of the most vicious acts of war carried out in the modern era—do they swing into action. Why do they care? Because Israel is Western in its orientation, and thus denounced as a “settler colonialist” country despite the fact that Jews were living in the Holy Land more than two thousand years before the first Arabs appeared.
That Greta Thunberg and many other leftists are engaged in both climate change and pro-Hamas activism is no coincidence. Rather, the two positions are of a piece: both are fraudulent and have little to do with their expressed purposes. Rather, both are born of hatred of Western civilization.
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Act of War
This is a disgrace. The U.S. currently has two Carrier Strike Groups, bearing almost unimaginable striking power, in the eastern Mediterranean. If our president were not a senile, half-witted fool, he would have told Hamas long ago that if all Americans were not freed within 12 hours, Gaza would be reduced to rubble. Not to mention that Gaza would never get another nickel of American money.
I am not much of a fan of Donald Trump, but that is what he would have done, and the American hostages would have been free within days after they were kidnapped. Joe Biden’s utter failure in the current crisis is one of the worst of his sad term in office. Remarkably, I have seen no criticism of his ineptitude in the press. I understand that reporters and editors are doing their best to protect the Democratic Party in the upcoming election, but their silence is a dereliction of duty almost on a par with Biden’s.
Where's the Demo?
You might assume that someone has gotten out a pencil and paper and figured out how a transition to “green” energy, accompanied by a transition to EVs, can possibly be implemented. But you would be wrong. There is no plan, no demonstration project, no set of calculations, no plausible feasibility study. The whole thing is a fantasy which will cause ever-increasing damage if politicians insist on pursuing it.
Decisive Result
It is true that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be described as a cycle of violence that has now continued for decades. But why is that?
Consider World War II, for example. The Germans and Japanese started the war, but did it lead to a cycle of violence? No. The war’s conclusion brought about a peace that continues to this day, as far as those combatants are concerned. Why is that? Because the war had a decisive result. Germany and Japan were crushed. There were millions of civilian casualties. The German and Japanese people understood that they had lost the war, and the war had been a catastrophe for them. They had no desire to renew the violence.
One can contrast that with World War I, which did not have a decisive result, and which did become part of a cycle of violence, i.e. World War II, precisely because the German people did not accept that they had lost the Great War.
Or consider the Napoleonic Wars. There was a cycle of violence that began with the French Revolution and continued intermittently until 1815. The cycle ended when France was decisively defeated in 1815, and was occupied for a time by the victorious powers. France suffered terribly, and the result was more than a half century of peace.
Then there is the Middle East. Israel fought a series of wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973 against Arab coalitions including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. There was, for a time, a cycle of violence. But the Arabs’ attacks failed decisively, and the hostile Arab powers eventually decided to give up on their ambitions and make peace. Several decades have now gone by without armed conflict between Israel and Egypt, Jordan or Syria.
Not so with the Palestinians, i.e., the Arabs who live in the former British Mandate. They have continued to launch terrorist attacks and wars against Israel from 1948 to the present, most recently and most horrifically last month. Why is that? Most fundamentally, because the Palestinians do not believe that they have been defeated by Israel. On the contrary, they—especially the Gazans—seem to have believed that they were doing pretty well. Intifada was good to them, yielding vast quantities of international aid and considerable international respect.
In my view, the approach taken by the E.U. and by Palestinian sympathizers in the U.S. is precisely wrong. If there is a cease fire, another tenuous “peace,” ongoing yammering about a two-state solution that the Palestinians have rejected over and over again, the cycle of violence will continue. The only thing that will stop it is a victory by Israel so crushing that Palestinians acknowledge they have been beaten, lay down their arms, and repudiate their leaders.
Deport the Barbarians
There you have it: the pro-genocide students (or many of them, anyway) are non-Americans, most likely from the Middle East. They have brought their unAmerican attitudes with them to this country. MIT doesn’t want them to be deported, likely in part, at least, because they are rich kids who pay full freight. Foreign students are a cash cow for universities, often being nearly the only ones who pay the university’s sticker price. So for MIT, left-wing ideology and financial interest probably go hand in hand.
Proportionality
It’s also based on absurd and completely ahistorical application of the doctrine of proportionality, which is also based on a deliberate obfuscation: “collective punishment.” We hear a lot of complaints about “collective punishment” by Israel of the Gazans, but that is a lie. That would apply if Israel still occupied Gaza, but they haven’t occupied it since 2005. This is not “collective punishment,” therefore — it is war, one started by the party recognized as the government of Gaza against Israel. Once started, the offended party has the right to see the war to a conclusion of victory either by feat of arms or the capitulation of its enemies in the field.
In no other war other than those involving Israel did the world impose a standard of civilian-death “proportionality,” because that standard would be absurd and does not exist. Did the US stop attacking the Taliban when the death toll in Afghanistan exceed the estimated 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11, for instance? Of course not, and no one called the war on Nazi Germany “collective punishment” on Germans either — and the Allies carpet-bombed Germany for years before ground troops utterly vanquished the Nazis.
Proportionality relates to the necessity of judging the gains of a military operation against the potential collateral loss of life among civilians and in making all practical efforts to limit the latter. It most certainly is not an equation of casualties. The IDF has always operated on the properly defined basis of proportionality and punished commanders who do not. It is beyond absurd, and arguably outright malevolent, to apply the casualty-equation standard to Israel in a war started in this manner. That’s especially true when based on the number of civilian deaths as reported by Hamas, a terrorist group that uses those numbers for its propaganda and includes its own operatives among those numbers too.
Material Support
This is an outright scandal. What happened to holding those in power accountable? What happened to democracy dying in darkness? For crying out loud, what happened to basic journalism?
And for that matter, what happened to the House Republicans? Rather than censure Tlaib for her genocidal sloganeering (or at least along with it), when will they demand an Ethics inquiry into this report? If this report is accurate, Tlaib shouldn’t be censured — she should be expelled and then investigated for material support of a terrorist group.
Crush the Death Cult
Israel isn’t ‘radicalizing’ anyone in this operation. Gaza has become a nest of genocidal radicals, and the only solution left to them is to destroy its command and control and force Gazans to reckon with their own choices. As Murray argues, that’s precisely what Britain and the West did with Germany and Japan. No one was arguing that Allied air strikes and ground operations in Germany were creating new Nazis, and Nazi Germany actually did have some anti-Nazi efforts before and during the war. Gaza has had no analogue to that dissent in the last 17 years, at all.
In short, or even at length, Murray rebuts practically every tongue-clucker in the West that turned a blind eye to Hamas’ 17-year rocket bombardment on Israeli civilian centers and numerous attacks culminating in the October 7 massacre, and who now wring their hands over “collective punishment.” This is not “punishment” — this is war, a war cheered by Gazans and conducted for nearly two decades by Hamas. The Israelis are putting an end to this war the same way that the Allies put an end to the Nazis — by defeating their enemy utterly.
Inside the Gates
The radical ideologies floating out there could be described as a swing of the pendulum, but the embrace of violence and destruction coupled with the open hatred for our society is a threat to the very existence of our culture. As it is intended to be.
What makes this outbreak of barbarianism fundamentally different from the 1960s, where we saw a similar descent into madness that wasn’t fully rejected until well into the Reagan years, is the fact that our major institutions are now owned by the barbarians themselves.
Western resilience in the 1980s was buttressed by the fact that our education system, Hollywood, and the media were not fundamentally corrupted in the way they are today. Each of these institutions leaned left, but not Left. They were dominated by people who thought America could be better, not that it must be destroyed.
That is no longer the case. Your average college professor is either a radical or is so intimidated by them that they remain quiet. Your average college student has already been exposed to over a decade of propaganda and is then thrown into a hothouse of political nihilism that it is a miracle if they come out sane.
Life Skills
But it is obvious that re-occupying Gaza will be painfully difficult at best. An entire generation of Gazans has been reared under the insane tutelage of Hamas. How much do they know of civilized life? Not much, as the horrors of October 7 demonstrate. Somehow, Israel will need to figure out how to govern such people.
My only word of advice, for what it is worth, is that as soon as possible after the war is over, Israel should cut off all foreign aid to Gaza. Gazans need to learn that trying to kill Jews is not a career path, and that economically useful skills are necessary for survival. These will be brand new ideas to those who have been raised under Hamas, with the indulgent support of the UN, the EU, and our own State Department.
Pallywood
There is now a name floating around for all the 2nd-rate but highly effective propaganda being pumped out of Gaza: Pallywood, and despite the horrors of war (or because of it, using gallows humor), it has become something of a joke. A joke because only the most credulous, like New York Times and BBC reporters, could fail to recognize how contrived it all is. So FAFO is showing up in memes now, proving that the average meme creator has an IQ 30 points higher than a BBC reporter.
It’s almost like the MSM want to believe it all so badly that they ignore the contradictions. Like that dead guy always popping up in new videos. Hey, wait…were they identical quintuplets or something? See, that indigenous Palestinian medicine must be miraculous!
There are reporters covering Gaza more fairly, but they stand out so much that it only emphasizes how distorted the average report from Gaza actually is.
Some of the best Pallywood productions, or most entertaining at least, are from the supposedly electricity-free hospitals in Gaza. You have the fake urgency, the bright lights, the extras overacting, and the recurring characters who magically change roles between patients, doctors, radiologists, and corpses.
I have no doubt that there are places in Gaza that are hazardous to one’s health, but there seem to be many that are safe enough to do play-acting for the media.
Israel should change that. No place should be safe for Hamas in Gaza, or anywhere else. If there are enough places available to set up Pallywood acting sets, there aren’t enough bombs falling. Let the BBC and NYT set up refuges for Pallywood actors to do their thing far away from Israel. They can then help produce the propaganda footage themselves and up the acting quality.
I take no joy in the death of civilians, although I have a hard time taking seriously the claimed horror that the “From the River to the Sea” folks claim to feel; after all, they weren’t horrified at all about Israeli deaths, about which many of them exulted. So screw them.
Monday, October 30, 2023
Importing Barbarians
Harvard, like most other universities, admitted large numbers of international students, including from the Islamic world. They set up centers for these students, as well as degree programs and similar types of centers for the various categories of “BIPOC” students. These programs and centers became hotbeds of radicalism and grievance. The universities sacrificed not only their prior meritocratic standards, but also their commitment to liberal principles, on the altar of diversity.
So if you look at pictures of a pro-genocide rally at Harvard or any other school, what do you see? Mostly, a lot of Middle Eastern students and far-left minorities. Did Harvard seriously not understand that Jew-hatred is rampant among these student groups and is fostered by the programs and institutions that purport to serve them? Or did it just not care?
So, can President Gay succeed in her professed desire to rid Harvard of anti-Semitism? She can if she really wants to, but no doubt she would find the prescription painful. Harvard can get rid of anti-Semitism by no longer admitting students from the Islamic world; terminating grievance-oriented racial programs and centers; and discarding its discrimination-heavy admissions model, so that Jews and Asians are treated equally with minority students. In short, by recognizing that anti-Semitism is one aspect of the larger sickness of the contemporary university.
Green Mythology
“Green” energy companies and electric vehicle manufacturers rely on governments to force consumers to buy their products, like it or not. But there is a limit to how much of a decline in their standard of living voters are willing to accept for the sake of “green” mythology. Blackouts have already begun (not to mention skyrocketing electricity prices), and as blackouts become more widespread, voters are going to punish the politicians who lied to them about “green” energy. Let’s hope that happens before tens of billions more dollars are poured into the coffers of the cynical “green” industries.
Because Reality
Note that I do not use the term “biological men.” “Man” and “woman” are biological terms. Thus, “biological man” is redundant. You cannot turn a man into a woman, no matter how much you mutilate him and give him drugs. Or vice versa.
Full Wrath
Israel’s first order of business should be exacting revenge against Gaza for the horrors of October 7. Most if not all of Gazan society has collaborated with Hamas over nearly two decades to turn that polity into the most hellish place on Earth, with a culture that is utterly dominated by Jew-hatred. Killing all the Jews between the river and the sea has long been the sole goal of Gaza’s foreign and domestic policies.
After World War II, many Germans claimed that they didn’t know about the Holocaust. Some of them may have been telling the truth. On the other hand, no one who lives in Gaza can have been ignorant of that polity’s genocidal purposes. Further, while Hamas, like the Nazi Party, is the duly elected government of Gaza, Hamas actually got a majority of the vote, which the Nazis never did. So Gazan “civilians,” assuming there are any, need to experience the full wrath of Israel’s revenge. The situation is the same as what obtained in Germany in 1945: Gazans need to experience the full horror of war, so that the survivors’ memories of October 7 will always provoke a shudder, and no Gazan will ever again propose wiping out the Jews.
Mindless Leftists Support Nazi Savages
What is impossible to explain to anybody is the hostages. If this is war, how do you justify taking hostages as bargaining chips? Women, children, grandmas…these are so clearly noncombatants, and hostage-taking is so indefensible that there is only one thing to do: hide the evidence.
Trash Takes Itself Out
There is only one obvious answer. Paul objects to the idea of Israel using weapons and ammunition from the United States against the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas. He describes this process as being “unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.” Which values would those be? The right to self-defense? The right to respond to years of civilians being bombarded with rockets launched across their border? Those sound like the actual values that America has embraced for the entire history of our country.
I would argue that this example of very “not quiet quitting” is little more than an exercise in virtue signaling from a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel leftist who somehow wound up with a job inside of our State Department. On that assumption, I suppose it’s better that he exits stage left rather than sticking around and potentially sabotaging one of our shipments to our closest ally in the Middle East. Add that to your resume and commence the job search, Mr. Paul. Be sure to let us know how it goes.
What's Occupied?
Gaza is not occupied and has not been for some time. The “occupation” apparently consists of the fact that Israel occupies territory that the Palestinians covet.
Who are the Colonizers?
“Palestine” is the name the Romans gave to Judea, the land of the Jews, as a punishment for Jewish rebellion. The name derives from the Philistines, non-semitic, sea-faring people from Crete who settled in the coastal area known as Canaan in the 12th Century BCE. The Philistines became enemies of the Jews — Goliath the best known. Arab armies invaded centuries later.
Palestine was ruled by foreign empires for millennia until the founding of Israel in part of that territory — an act of decolonization.
Send the Nazi Savages to Iran
The only country that should give refuge to the Gazans at the moment is Iran. They authored the present misery of the Gazans through their proxy Hamas. Iran won’t take them in either, though, even apart from the logistics of that kind of relocation. For one thing, the Persian Shi’ite mullahs couldn’t care less about the mainly Sunni Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank, but also they can’t afford their destabilizing presence either. They already have a restive population that the IRGC can barely contain, and that population hates the Palestinians and the way that the mullahs exploit their cause to justify their oppression.
Abdullah is right about the solution to the Palestinian issue, too. “This is a situation that has to be handled within Gaza and the West Bank,” he declared. The answer lies with the Palestinians, and it always has. Had they accepted the 1948 partition, they would never have had to live for eight decades in camps. Had they chosen to pursue peace and engagement with Israel as a final outcome, they would have had their own state decades ago, along with tons of Western investment. Instead, the Palestinians have insisted on annihilating Israel and seizing the land “from the river to the sea,” and keep adding to their misery.
Nazi Savage Culture
But there is something else going on, something beyond even Israel’s need to win the war or the entirely appropriate desire to exact revenge. The Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, have the sickest culture on Earth. Little productive work is done; Gaza exists largely as the beneficiary of international welfare. Instead of goods and services, the main product of Gaza is ideology—the perverted ideology of Jew-hatred.
Reap the Whirlwind
The “humanitarian crisis” is 100% the fault of Hamas and the large majority of Gazans who have supported Hamas for years. They sowed the wind, and they are about to reap the whirlwind. To the extent that there are innocents—non-Hamas supporters—who suffer, Israel has tried to prevent that suffering, while Hamas and the majority who support Hamas have deliberately brought it on.
Crush the Nazi Savages
When a country is attacked, the only appropriate course is to respond with massively disproportionate force, as we did against the Japanese in World War II. Israel should treat Gaza as the Allies treated Dresden and other German and Japanese cities to end that war. Israel made a mistake in withdrawing from Gaza, and Gaza has been a thorn in its side ever since. This should be the last time.Also:
In fighting this war, the Israelis should not distinguish between Hamas and non-Hamas, any more than we distinguished between members of the Nazi Party and non-members when we crushed Germany. And I don’t want to hear one goddam word about civilian casualties. Civilian casualties are what happen when you start a war.
The Palestinians started it, Israel should end it. Quickly, with overwhelming force that ensures nothing similar will happen again.
Hamas’s invasion was no mere act of terrorism. It was, rather, an act of war carried out by what is effectively a state. Prime Minister Netanyahu got it right when he said, immediately after the invasion was launched, that Israel was at war.
The difference is important. If the invasion was just another in a long series of terrorist outrages, then selective reprisals, as in the past, are the presumptive response. In other words, doing again what hasn’t worked before—destroying a few military installations and taking out a handful of political or military leaders. War is different. A war ends only when one side internalizes the fact that it is beaten and loses the will to continue.
When I say “one side,” I don’t mean military or political leaders, who face their own imperatives and may or may not ever choose to give up. I mean the civilian population (acknowledging that in Gaza it is not easy to tell who is a civilian, but that doesn’t matter for this purpose). Why did the Allies fire-bomb Dresden? Not to achieve some discrete military objective, but to horrify the German people and convince them that continuing the war would lead only to further catastrophe. Likewise with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In total war, the situation in which Israel finds itself, destroying the will of the civilian population to resist is the ultimate military objective.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Thermodynamically Competent
The wind industry’s capital costs were very high before the Ukraine crisis, and now, like everybody else’s, are shooting up still further: the cost of steel, concrete, carbon fibre, copper and all the other ingredients of a wind turbine have risen sharply. Operating costs are rising. Inevitably, the energy generated by wind is expensive.
And…wind itself is thermodynamically inferior. Consequently, it takes a huge machine — the building of which requires a lot of energy — to extract a small amount of electricity from randomly fluctuating, low-density wind, which bloweth as and when it listeth. By contrast, in a nuclear plant, it takes a small machine to produce a flood of energy from a dense, “thermodynamically competent” energy source, and on demand.
Via John Hinderaker.
Trump = Electoral Disaster
Well, Donald, that is how it works. All kinds of people, most of them people I disagree with, use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE. I take it that Trump is threatening to drive NBC off the air (MSNBC doesn’t use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA) for being dishonest. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. It would be unconstitutional. It would blow up in Trump’s face. The FCC by law is bipartisan, and Trump couldn’t find a single remotely qualified appointee who would undertake to revoke NBC’s broadcast license. The whole thing is idiotic.
But that is Donald Trump. He does some good things, and then he nullifies them with inexpressibly stupid behavior like this. Everyone who pays attention knows that threats to free speech and the First Amendment come from the left, not the right. But by pronouncements like this one, Trump enables the Democrats to paint Republicans as the enemies of free speech. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And sadly typical.
Mediocrity
That Hillary Clinton is ungracious is not new information. That she continues to be obsessed with her own political ups and downs has been apparent for quite a while. But she is also not very intelligent. For many years, Democrats have tried to promote Hillary Clinton as a uniquely brilliant person, the flower of Yale-educated womanhood, more than a match for any man. In fact, she was never more than a mediocre and unoriginal intellect, and a not very competent administrator. She has gone downhill steadily from there, as her State Department appearance exemplifies.
We should all be eternally grateful that this utter mediocrity never became president.
