Category Archives: Energy

Rule Five Scottish Rebellion Friday

My own background is strongly Scots-Irish and German.  I can tell you from history, the history of Scotland and the history of my own family, that if there’s one thing the Scots are good at, it’s rebelling.  Of late Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, seems to be something of the poor stepchild in that relationship.  But now we are heartened to see the Scots rebelling again – this time over the ir own country’s mandates over heat pumps.

A group of Scottish politicians is warning that the government’s plan to force households to install heat pumps by 2033 is not feasible in rural areas, The Telegraph reports

Four members of parliament from different parties, all representing rural areas of Scotland, have signed a letter calling for an “urgent review” of the SNP-Green government’s proposal to require households to install electric-powered heat pumps.

Scottish buildings minister Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, introduced a reforms package to “decarbonise” Scotland’s homes and bring them in line with “new energy efficiency standards no later than 2033.” His proposed reforms of the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating system may even make it impossible to sell a home that does not have a heat pump system installed. 

Already in 2021, Scotland’s energy minister admitted that installing a heat pump in a home would cost about £10,000 and be more expensive to run than a fossil fuel boiler, which costs approximately £2,500 to install. But in rural areas, the costs of installing a heat pump are estimated to soar to as much as £32,000.

It’s nothing new, of course, for pols with agendas and who hail from heavily urbanized areas to ignore the wants and needs of rural folks.  As evidence look here in the U.S. at the Imperial City’s push for electric cars, which may be practical for a big-city commuter but sure as hell not for those of us who live in rural environments, especially with sub-zero winter temperatures.

Some Scots MPs are pushing back.

All this has led a small group of rural Scottish lawmakers to come together against the planned reforms.

The letter to the Scottish government, seen by The Telegraph, demands a thorough rethinking of the proposal. It was crafted by Fergus Ewing, a former SNP government cabinet secretary, and signed by Labour and Tory MSPs. Ewing told The Telegraph, 

By seeking to reform EPCs and forcing rural homeowners to rely on electrified heating alone from 2025, the Scottish Government is taking an approach to decarbonisation that will pose a serious risk to those living in remote areas.

Not only does it threaten to burden off-grid property owners with overwhelming costs, but it also leaves them vulnerable to extreme-weather-induced power outages and disregards the realities of inefficient rural and islands’ electricity grids and infrastructure.

Douglas Lumsden, the Scottish Tory shadow energy minister, another signatory of the letter, called the proposals “deeply unfair on Scotland’s rural communities”:

If we are to reach net zero, we need to do so in a way that is fair, affordable, and which offers choice to Scottish homeowners. Given the timescales involved, ministers must urgently review these proposals.

It’s doubtful that rural Scottish dwellers will start painting their faces with woad, sharpening their claymores, blowing the dust out of their bagpipes and forming up for battle.  But expect to see more of this.  We face many similar issues here in the States, where those of us who live in rural areas are either ignored or are having our chosen lifestyles downright threatened by big-city pols.  Our own representatives are badly outnumbered and even the ones who speak for us honestly are drowned out in the urban noise.

We can continue, of course, to push back through the usual channels, as these Scottish pols are doing.  But more and more, I think you’ll see a lot of folks out here in the hinterlands just ignore the finger-wagging.  One can already see a fair amount of this here in the Great Land, where (outside of Anchorage and Juneau, at any rate) the populace in general are some of the most “buzz off and leave us alone” types you’re liable to find anywhere.

And so one side continues to try to interfere, while the other tries to ignore them.  Sooner or later something is going to break.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

We have family visiting from the Lower 48, so the weekly links may be a bit on the thin side.  But we’ll try to make sure that, even if the quantity drops off a little, the quality remains the same!

Now then…

On To the Links!

Trump Indictments: The Charge Is the Fraud

Hawaiian business owners slam Biden(‘s handlers) non-response to Maui fires. Never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up.

Related:  This should come as a surprise to no one.

President Biden’s Haplessness Isn’t Funny Anymore

If this isn’t the understatement of the week, it will do until a better one comes along.

Hint:  They are leaving blue states and going to red states.

New York City Rat Problem so Bad Now They’re a Tourist Attraction

This guy is a frickin’ hero by any standard.

No shit, Karl.

China’s growth may be over.

Of course Joe the Plumber was right about Obama.

My RedState Stuff:

The State of America – Are We Too Late?

Raccoons in Germany Have Started to Steal Beer

The Legacy Media and the Coup Du Publique

Americans Could Be Limited to Two Beers a Week

Trump Appears in a Swedish Steak

Defanging the Three-Headed Monster Wrecking Our Economy

Sunday Gun Day V – Five Shotguns You Should Shoot Before You Die

Rock Legend Alice Cooper Angers Trans Activists, Gets Canceled by Makeup Company

America Has a Critical Shortage of Skilled Workers

The Pipsqueak 5.56mm, the AR-15, and Relative Power Levels

We May Hold Him Deer, but He’s a Thief All the Same

Vox Reporter Calls for Government-Subsidized Fake Meat Research

This Week’s Idiots:

MSNBC’s Michael Cohen (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

The Nation’s Joan Walsh is an idiot.

Maureen Dowd beclowns herself.

If President Biden(‘s handlers) listen to the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont, he’s dumber than we thought.

The Hill’s Glenn Altschuler is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) remains a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

Vox’s Julieta Cardenas is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

I’ve been a fan of Bob Dylan since the mid-Seventies, when my hippie brother first got me listening to his older acoustic work. What a lot of people don’t realize about America’s Songwriter is that he’s still working, still touring, and still turning out some pretty great music.  In 2012, he released the album Tempest, which included the fun, rollicking tune Duquesne Whistle.  The video is pretty fun to watch, too.  Here it is; enjoy.

Rule Five Windmills Friday

The concomitant stupidity of “wind power” on grid-scale just keeps getting more and more obvious to anyone that’s paying attention.  Here Issues & Insights points out some of the more obvious issues:

There are a number of problems with wind farms:

  • They eat up far more land than any of the conventional forms of energy production, as well as nuclear. It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres. Bryce pointed out in a paper he wrote for the Center of the American Experiment that it would take the land equal to two entire Californias “to meet America’s current electricity needs with wind energy.”
  • Due to rising costs and logistical headaches, “developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s “an industry in crisis.”
  • Wind turbines, writes energy consultant Ronald Stein, “are now becoming an eyesore, a hazard, and a significant environmental threat” in a policy piece that asks if wind farms generate more waste than they do electricity.
  • Wind farms have to be built in open spaces where power isn’t needed. Moving the electricity to where it’s eventually used destroys the landscape in between.
  • In Scotland, 16 million trees, each one of them with their names surely written on every environmentalists’ hearts, have been felled to open ground on which to build wind farms.
  • The late physicist David MacKay, who said “you know I love wind turbines,” believed that building wind farms is “actually a waste of money.”
  • Even the government is an obstacle. Reason reported not quite a year ago that “construction on what could be a massive offshore wind farm in Massachusetts has been held up for years due to” federal reviews.

Now, author and reformer Michael Shellenberger is documenting how off-shore wind farms are killing whales.  Have a look:

Holy crap!

If nothing else turned the public off of these massive wind-turbine farms – aside from the expense (oh, and all the materials that can only be sourced from fossil fuels) and the difficulty in disposing of the turbine blades when their useful lives are up, is the massive footprint these things require to develop power on a scale that’s even remotely adequate for the power grid.

This isn’t just a boondoggle.  It is fraud on a massive scale.  Look at that first bullet point:  “It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres.”

But there’s hope:

(Energy author Robert) Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of ​​solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.

Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”

Let’s hope this trend continues.  We live in a time where the nation is trillions in debt, our fiscal rating keeps slipping, Congresscritters of both parties have abandoned even the pretense of fiscal restraint, and yet the Imperial and state governments keep subsidizing and promoting this horseshit.

Enough is enough.  Let’s hope the resistance to this keeps on growing.  If private businesses or homeowners want to try wind and/or solar on their own property, fine; they are welcome to do so at their own cost, then we’ll see if they can prove efficiency or even capability in the market place.  There are in fact a few people wop know here in the Great Land who are off-grid and depend on solar (and Diesel generators) for power.  That’s fine – their choice, their responsibility.

But it’s pretty well established now that grid-scale wind power isn’t viable.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

In Alaska news: We have a Red-Backed Vole living under our workshop building.  I’ve seen her a couple of times, making the scurrying crossing from the workshop to glean seeds from under the bird feeder at the front of our office building.  I know it’s a “she” because the other day she had her two little bitty baby voles with her.

Red-Backed Vole

Voles are basically short-tailed mice.  Mice (the clean outdoor kind, not the nasty invading-your-house kind) are generally pretty good neighbors.  They are clean, they feed mostly on seeds but will snack on bugs if the opportunity permits.  And mice in general are Nature’s Nachos – everything eats them.  Our little local Cooper’s Hawk prefers birds but will pick up a mouse if it can; and our resident Least Weasel, Herman the Ermine, prefers mice above all things.  But in spite of that, there are still mice around.  They’re great survivors.

Now then…

On To the Links!

They forgot “work spouse.”

A possible new human ancestor.

Bank Records Show $20 Million to Biden-Tied Businesses

Biden Needs To Stop Lying to Gold Star Families

Stossel: The ‘Consensus’ on Climate Change Is ‘Manufactured’

Garland’s Latest Dirty Trick To Protect ‘Big Guy’

We All Pay The Price For Uncle Sam’s Bad Credit

Millions Flowed to Biden Family From China

It’s working fine for me.

Fuck ranked-choice voting.

No shit, Sherlock.

I’m coming around to the idea of shooting looters.

Good and hard.

I don’t know who “50 Cent” is, but he’s right.

My RedState Stuff:

Richard Nixon – A Tragedy in Five Acts

BREAKING: Multiple FBI Field Offices Targeting Catholics as Domestic Terrorists

Newsom vs. DeSantis Debate Prep: The Smart Move for Gavin Newsom Is to Bow Out

Fifth Circuit Strikes Down Law Forbidding Gun Ownership by Drug Users

Civil Forfeiture Is Legalized Theft

Sen. Joe Manchin Reportedly ‘Thinking Seriously’ About Dropping out of Democrat Party

BREAKING: Illinois Supreme Court Upholds Semi-Auto Gun Ban

Environmentalists, Misanthropy, and Hypocrisy

Judge Rules Some California Students Can Sue State Over Learning During School Lockdowns

Pence, Other GOP Candidates Split on Abortion Law Over Federal Vs. State

US Government Credit Is Sinking, But Spending Is Still Running Wild

Sunday Gun Day III – Great Guns for Small Game

I’m Not Saying It’s Aliens, But in 2027 It Will Be Aliens

Social Security Reform is Too Little, Too Late

Fake Meat Fails

Doggone!

In Energy Production, Coal Is Still King

The Best States to Live In, 2023 – Really?

This Week’s Idiots:

Salon’s Olivia Luppino is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Max Burns is an idiot.

The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky is an idiot.

Vox’s Darren Grant is an idiot.

The Nation’s Amy Littlefield is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

I’m not a fan of modern heavy metal music.  I find it too formulaic, it all seems to sound the same, feature the same few guitar riffs, and all the lead singers sound the same, alternating between grunts and squalls like a cat whose tail was caught in a door.

But when my son-in-law, who is a big metal fan, sent me a link to a video by some group called the Texas Hippie Coalition and their song Pissed Off And Mad About It, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my current attitudes towards the Imperial government and the state of our country.  Here, let me know what you think.

Rule Five Blackout Friday

From one of my favorites, Issues & Insights, comes this:  You’ll Have Blackouts, And You Will Love Them.  Wanna bet?

When the power goes out, most of us just have to wait until it’s restored to get back to our normal lives. In the meantime, as we wander through a dark house flipping useless switches out of habit, we make sure we don’t open the refrigerator and we put off anything we had planned that requires us to burn electricity. The more-prepared among us, though, buy fossil-fuel-powered generators to avoid interruptions

Their future, though, is in doubt. The Biden administration wants those generators to go the way of the incandescent light bulb.

“Just months after a Biden-appointed regulator teased a ban on gas stoves, the administration is working to enact a rule that would prohibit the manufacturing of nearly all portable gas generators on the U.S. market,” the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week.

Here in the Great Land, power outages aren’t unusual, although the local electrical co-op does sterling work in identifying and fixing the causes of those outages as quickly as one could reasonably expect – or even a bit quicker – especially considering all the distances they have to cover.  Almost all of our power and phone lines are above ground on poles, and we have frequent show, ice, wind, trees falling, all the things that can mess up electrical lines.  Only last Saturday night the power was out for four hours, as a tree had fallen on a trunk line.

That’s why most houses up here are built to accept backup power from a generator, and that’s why most folks up here have backup generators.  It’s that way in lots of rural and small-town areas.

But the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration seems to deliberately want to make life harder for those of us who choose to live out in the woods.  I&I continues:

This proposed rule would limit the amount of carbon monoxide a product can release, establishing a benchmark beyond the reach of all but a few current generators. The Free Beacon says the Consumer Product Safety Commission admits “that 95% of portable gas generators on the market cannot comply with its new standard.”

Should the rule become “law,” industry officials expect a shortage of generators will follow, as manufacturers would have only have six months to develop a compliant design. Under normal conditions, that would take years, according to the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association.

While some homeowners use standby generators, which have more permanence about them, to provide power when the lights go out, portables are used as well, with “far more people” choosing them because of price. What the cost-conscious consumers didn’t know when they made their purchases is that one day they would be punished for their choice. But those who have standby generators shouldn’t feel too smug. The Democrats will eventually come after those, too.

We know this because Joe Biden and his party have been on a banning and regulatory spree, targeting gas stoves, washing machines, and refrigerators. Other modern conveniences in the White House sights: water heaters, ceiling fans, and lightbulbs. The justifications for the bans and regulatory impositions are always the same: to cut greenhouse gas emissions and save energy.

Forget all the discussions about relative efficiencies, emissions, any of that crap.  Forget all the discussions about the grid, or how regulation can make various appliances more or less efficient.  None of that matters.  What matters is this.

That’s right.  The Imperial City has zero authority to do this.  In a sane world, courts across the land would be striking this crap down.  In a sane world, a Congress that cared about the Constitution would have long since defunded and disbanded all of the extra-constitutional agencies that crop up like mushrooms after a rain.

But we no longer live in a sane world.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Boy howdy, have we made up for our cold, wet, rainy early summer over the last few days with unseasonably warm temperatures; at least the sun is out.

Tomorrow:

Yeah, yeah, I know.  A friend of mine lives in Arizona, and he has been regaling me with tales of triple-digit temps.  But this is Alaska.  74 is hot, dammit.  We moved up here to get away from warm weather.  I know, I’ll get back to you in six months when it’s twenty below.

And so…

On To the Links!

Major revelations from the whistleblower hearings.

Shocker: Net zero is economically illiterate.

Democrats, FBI Are Struggling To Cover for Biden’s Lies

Try That In a Small Town.

Job growth in government is not a good thing.

Because it’s really cool to be able to write “Giant Viking House.”

Jan 6th was, at worst, hooliganism.  It’s nice to see Gov. DeSantis recognizes that.

I love a happy ending.

Ya think?

No shit, the Democrats started it.

They can create money from nothing, why can’t they erase debt for nothing?

No shit, Sherlock.

These assholes aren’t even trying to hide it any more.

Haw haw haw!

Some of us never did believe Biden.

Not only is this a stupid idea, the FDA has no business regulating cigar flavors.

Now if only we could have some American politicians regenerate some brains.

My RedState Stuff:

In Shocking Turn of Events, Gallup Poll Shows Americans Less Favorable to Immigration

Jason Aldean and the Conflict of Rural vs. Urban

Rents Are High—Regulation Is Driving Them Even Higher

Shocking Study: Bowel Regularity Connected to Mental Health

America’s Accelerating Debt, Rising Interest Rates, and Fiscal Irresponsibility Require a Balanced Budget

Brazil: More Guns, Less Crime

Mohamad Barakat: Serious Omissions by Legacy Media

What Is a Nation—And How Can We Protect Ours?

New Data Shows Hot Weather Devastating for the Endurance of Electric Vehicles

The Border Crisis, Texas, Washington, Jackson, and Calhoun

Diversity, an Undefinable Proposition

Retail Thieves Aren’t Starving

The American Economy Suffers Under Bidenomics

Did the Justice Department Illegally Fund Red Flag Laws?

The Barakat Case: Are There Larger Implications?

This Week’s Idiots:

Salon’s Heather Parton is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Michael Cohen (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

RealClearPennsylvania’s Brendan Boyle is an idiot.

The Boston Globe’s Kimberly Atkins Stohr is an idiot.

The Nation’s Jeet Heer (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Poor Jessica Tarlov.  I used to kind of like her, but she’s descending into idiocy.

Amanda Marcotte (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones is an idiot.

NPR’s Julia Simon is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Tony Bennett was one of the all-time greats, and his passing at 96 last week was saddening.  While he’s probably best known for I Left My Heart in San Francisco, the state of that formerly-great city today has kind of soured me on the whole thing.

Instead, here’s another great Tony Bennett tune: What The World Needs Now, from his 1969 album I’ve Gotta Be Me.  We’ll miss you, Tony!

Animal’s Daily Doom Pixie News

Before I get into this, be sure to check out Part IV of Sweetheart as well as a bonus post over at Glibertarians.

Now then:  A little while ago, over at my RedState desk (OK, it’s actually the same desk, but you get the point) I chronicled the Swedish Doom Pixie Greta Thunberg’s war on prosperity.  If you haven’t read it yet, go, then, and do so.  I’ll wait right here.

Back? OK, let’s get into the update on the Doom Pixie’s latest fiasco.

A Swedish court on Monday fined climate activist Greta Thunberg for disobeying police during an environmental protest at an oil facility last month. Thunberg, 20, admitted to the facts but denied guilt, saying the fight against the fossil fuel industry was a form of self-defense due to the existential and global threat of the climate crisis.

“We cannot save the world by playing by the rules,” she told journalists after hearing the verdict, vowing she would “definitely not” back down.

The sentencing appeared to have little effect on her determination — just a few hours later, Thunberg and activists from the Reclaim the Future movement returned to an oil terminal in the southern Swedish city of Malmö to stage to another roadblock. A photo then showed her being carried away by police officers.

The photo:

Doesn’t look to me like the Doom Pixie is suffering too much from rough handling by the Swedish fuzz.

Oh, and her fine?  2,500 kronor.  That’s about $240, American.  The Doom Pixie apparently has a net worth of about a million bucks.  I’ll grant you I’m not familiar with typical fines emanating from the Swedish justice system, and to be fair, it’s not like she knocked over a liquor store or robbed an old lady at gunpoint.

But were I that judge, I think I would have tried to make it sting a little more than that.

This fine won’t stop the Doom Pixie.  It won’t slow her down.  Assholes gonna asshole, and Greta is sure as hell determined to make a career of being an asshole.

Animal’s Daily Stupid Is As Stupid Does News

A German woman, dubbed by a groups of idiots as a “brutal blonde,” is in the news for running out of patient with climate protesters/morons.

A woman in Germany was dubbed a “brutal blonde” by European media after she dragged a climate change activist from blocking traffic as the public’s patience wears thin with the frequent protests on roadways. 

The video showed a woman screaming at a climate change protester to “get up” from blocking a road in Bottrop, Germany, according to a video posted by an activist group. 

Then, the woman grabbed the activist by her hair and dragged her to the side of the road. When the girl returned to block the road, the German woman dragged her by the hair a second time.

The Brutale Blondine wasn’t the only commuter that was pissed off.

Climate activists from the Letzte Generation – “The Last Generation” – who posted the video of the “brutal blonde,” have been staging protests that have tested the public’s patience in Germany. Numerous videos recently published on the activist group’s Twitter account have shown angry drivers getting out of their vehicles to yell, berate and forcibly remove “Letzte Generation,” activists. 

Some drivers have blown past the activists, knocking them over in the process. 

The activist methods also included gluing their hands to the road, so they cannot be removed without the fire department chipping out the cement underneath their hands. One activist screamed in pain as a responder tried to free his hand, according to a video that circulated on Twitter. 

Sooner or later, one of these idiots is going to enter into the annals of the Darwin Awards, almost certainly by being run over.  The only really amazing thing is that it hasn’t happened already.

But here’s the fun bit: These morons (I’m running low on synonyms for stupid people) are certainly hurting their cause more than helping it.  Oh, some of them probably have some self-image of martyrdom for the climate cause, but that’s a canard.  I’m sure that when these protesters look in the mirror, they see heroes.  But regular folks look at them and see stupidity.

Stupid is as stupid does.  It’s only a matter of time before one of these nitwits is killed, and sure as I’m sitting here, the rest of the whistle-ass pecker-heads in the “movement” will pronounce them martyrs for the cause.

But you know what the thing is about martyrs?

They’re dead.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Your chances of being bitten by a venomous snake are rising.  Not mine, though.  There are no venomous snakes in Alaska.  And no, St. Patrick never set foot in the Great Land.

In fact, the only reptiles found in Alaska are sea turtles, namely, the Green, Loggerhead, Leatherback and Olive Ridley.  Now when I was a little tad back in Allamakee County, we had timber rattlers.  The Old Man and I once killed one that was damn near six feet long.  A snake like that can kill a grown man.

So, if you live in the lower 48, watch where you put your feet.

And so…

On To the Links!

John Lott drops some truthiness.

BAM! POW!

Buy your own damn e-bike.

I love a happy ending.

Biden can’t turn things around.  He’s senile, stupid and incompetent.

My money’s on Hunter.

Down in Norway’s deepest hole.  No, not that!  Get your mind out of the gutter.

Gross.  Ew.  Gross.

A few decades ago this guy would have been a circus freak.

Tucker Carlson grills GOP candidates in Iowa.

“Crisis” is something of an understatement; our schools are in free-fall.

China offering bounties for dissidents.

The Anti-Racism racket.

Democrats hate America.

Chatbots aren’t taking our jobs.

He who laughs last, laughs best.

This is why our armed services are an utter mess.

Mike Pence fucks up, bad.

Americans favor nuclear power.  See, we ain’t so dumb.

My RedState Stuff:

Dylan Mulvaney, Frying Pans, and Fires

Politics, Political Parties, and Modern Whigs

Racism and the Military: Worst Practices by Biden Joint Chiefs Nom, Gen. Charles Brown

Joe Manchin, Missed Messages, and 2024

‘Homeless Encampments’ on the Rise as Leftist Cities Get What They Vote For

George Will Weighs in on Trump and DeSantis in 2024: Who Can It Be Now?

Three Great Movies That Couldn’t Be Made Today

China’s Great False Front May Be Cracking

Iowa’s Red Shift

The Homeless Problem: Why Aren’t More Families Stepping Up?

Michelle Obama for President? Not Only No But…

To Fix Failing Education – Privatize!

Manchin and Huntsman: Nobody’s Dream Team

President Trump’s Second Term: Fire at Will!

Wanted: Warriors

Alaska’s Pizza, Unions, and Economics

Heat Wave Aside, Climate-Related Damage Is at Historic Lows

This Week’s Idiots:

Salon’s Heather Parton is an idiot.

Mother Jones’ Arianna Coghill is an idiot.

The Nation’s Robert Borosage is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Hayes Brown (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Slate’s Evan Urquhart is an idiot.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Cori Bush (Moron – TX) (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Charles Barkley outs himself as a raging asshole.

The incoming Mayor of Chicago is an idiot, and all his people are idiots.

Ilhan Omar (Horse’s Ass – MN) is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

No music this week; instead, something else fun.

If you look up “noodling for catfish” and “adorable” on an internet search, you’ll find Hannah Barron.  Her vivacious attitude, entrancing Southern drawl, zest for the outdoor life and skill at pulling huge catfish out of muddy river bottoms make her well worth watching.  Here’s a sample:

Check out her YouTube channel here.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Wow.  Think apex predators today are weird? Have a look at this guy:

Anomalocaris canadensis

This is Anomalocaris canadensis, a top predator of the Cambrian, about 500 million years ago.  Kind of a big death-shrimp, running up to two feet long. It very likely chased around soft-bodied critters in the Cambrian seas, skewered them with those big spiky grabbers on its front end and slurped them down.

One wonders how they’d taste, but you’d need a big pot and a lot of drawn butter.

Now then…

On To the Links!

Riots in France have cost businesses $1 billion – so far.

Oh, his age is a joke all right – just not the way he’s trying to say.

So, end it.

To improve public schools, end public schools. I don’t think they can be saved.

What Stop Oil Now wants is the end of our modern, technological civilization.

Job growth wobbles.

Fuck off, slavers!

Causes of low voter turnout in Alaska’s 2022 election.

I wonder what he’ll do to embarrass the United States this time.

We can hope.

Bidenomics.

More military diversity hires.

Nothing will ever “cure inequality.”  Not in economics.  We can strive for equal treatment under the law, and that is all.

My RedState stuff:

Pronouns ‘They/Them’ Make Resumes More Likely To Be Ignored

Electric Vehicles, Taxation, and Government Intrusion

Using AI to Turn the Tables on Scammers

An Alaska Independence Day Tradition – the Glacier View Car Huck

The Savagery of Automating Genital Mutilation Surgery

‘Assault Weapons’ and Hogging the Spotlight

Donald Trump – Our Horatius at the Bridge?

New Poll on Unity and Disunity – The Divided States?

The Decline and Fall of Joe Biden

Ghost Guns and Inconvenient Truths

Living Alone and Human Nature

Ghost Guns: A New Wrinkle

Rights and the Individual

2024 and the Kennedy Problem

Germany and the Rise of the Right

This Week’s Idiots:

Newsweek’s Dallas Ducar is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Keisha Blain is an idiot.

The daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont is still an idiot.

The Los Angeles Times’ Jean Guerrero is an idiot.

One.  Heartbeat.  Away.

The Nation’s Chris Lehmann is an idiot.

Salon’s Heather Parton is an idiot.

Vox’s  Ian Millhiser (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Anthea Butler is an idiot.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Alden Loury is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

I’ll be brief here: The summer I was eighteen, I had a ‘liaison” that lasted about two months, with a divorcee who was exactly twice my age. This was before the term ‘cougar’ was coined to describe this sort of thing, but boy howdy, if that ain’t exactly what she was. I spent a few Friday and Saturday nights (overnights, that is) at her apartment, but her ex kept coming around with bunches of flowers, trying to patch things up, and that was awkward. So the relationship kind of unraveled, although we stayed friends until I eventually moved away from Iowa for good a few years later. I don’t know where she is now, and she’d be pushing eighty.  Wow.

I will say I learned an awful lot that summer…

Anyhoo…  The pack of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells I called my friends teased me a fair amount about this liaison, and regularly greeted me when I showed up someplace by singing this song; if you remember the 1967 film The Graduate, you’ll understand why.