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.
