Limits to Growth – or We’re All Gonna Die

 

William R. Forstchen had an excellent piece recently at American Thinker on today’s climate crisis:

Oh my God -- we’re doomed.  The UN’s Panel on Climate Change came out with a frightening report earlier this month that we are sitting on a global time bomb, and according to CNN, “time is running out,” without immediate drastic action.  The UN report states that if global temperatures reach 1.5 C above the pre-industrial temperature norm of 1850-1900, the resulting melting of the polar ice caps, rising oceans, and unprecedented ecological disaster will follow.

I read this a few days back on a dark and stormy night while working on my own tome about disaster, the next book in the One Second After series.  One Second After examines what would happen if we were ever hit by an enemy using an Electro-Magnetic Pulse generated from detonating a nuclear weapon in space.  But ecological disaster, which is all but inevitable according to the highly respected UN report, was far more frightening.  Closing off working on my book, I brewed yet another cup of coffee, sat back and pulled out a well-respected study on this existential threat to all mankind.

I started to thumb through the pages of a work that took a team of international experts years to research and has sold well over 12 million copies since publication.

I turned to the chapter on fossil fuels.  The report states we have only about twenty more years of oil out there, we are already at peak oil, which will then start to go downhill and the wells will run dry no matter how much we scramble to get more.  There will be a final rush to pump one more drop of oil even if at the cost of twenty dollars a gallon, but that in turn will accelerate the depletion into a death spiral.  Natural gas will not save us, as we turn to that source as oil runs out, we’ll deplete that as well.  Again, a death spiral. 

Climate is the big one this report.  Despite our feeble efforts to address the radical changes already taking place, the disaster will explode within ten to fifteen years, due in large part to the depletion of farmlands worldwide from the use of toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil exhaustion, and encroaching urban population.  The results: famine, disease, and mass starvation then triggering political instability in which hundreds of millions will die.

The list went on and on, a list that would render any sane reader numb with despair.  But me?  I could only smile at it all. . . 

The punchline:

You see, the book that I was reading, Limits to Growth, was published more than fifty years ago in 1972. . . .

And every predicted doomsday catastrophe has failed to materialize.  Read the rest here; Mr. Forstchen’s column includes specific doomsday scenarios with all those missed “deadlines.”

# # #

New voter photo ID law takes effect next week

 

Jake Zuckerman at Cleveland.com reports:

A new state law takes effect next week requiring Ohioans to present a state-issued photo ID to vote, whether early or on Election Day.

The effective date next week means the new law will apply to voters participating in local and county elections taking place this year. Its fuller test, however, will occur next year in presidential, U.S. Senate and statewide races.

In previous elections, Ohioans could prove their identity with alternate forms of identification like a utility bill or bank statement with their address on it. But come April 7, they’ll need state-issued identification from Ohio or a valid U.S. passport. . . .

Click here for the rest of the report.

# # #

Who funds Antifa?

 

Andy Ngo is senior editor at The Post Millennial and author of the NYT bestseller, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Earlier this week at the NY Post, he reported on the radical organization Antifa’s funding sources:

Last week, the city of Philadelphia agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 left-wing protesters who alleged they suffered “physical and emotional injuries” when police used tear gas and pepper spray to clear them off a major highway in downtown at a Black Lives Matter-style direct action in 2020.

Videos recorded at the time showed the mob shut down the highway while vandalizing public property. 

As a journalist who reports on the militant far-left and its rioters, the question I’m asked most often is, “Who funds them?”

Some believe billionaire George Soros is responsible.

And they would be partially correct. Soros funds groups that form part of the support apparatus of left-wing militants — district attorneys, biased media and legal groups.

But his money doesn’t directly reach the pockets of militants on the street.

Who ends up paying far-left rioters like Antifa? Too often, taxpayers like you and me.

Through a developed network of radical leftist legal groups, like the National Lawyers Guild, lawfare against cities and police departments is the go-to method for payloads. . . .

Here’s the really ugly part:

. . . Nearly every American city afflicted by mass protesting and rioting in 2020 ended up settling and paying out millions in taxpayer money to radical protesters who were allegedly subjected to force by law enforcement. . . .

Read the rest here. 

 # # #

Hillsdale College and government funding

 

In the wake of the Stanford University debacle, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) scores again with “Who Owns The University?”  The entire column (at American Greatness) is, as usual, full of excellent insights, but these paragraphs particularly caught my eye:

. . . After all, Stanford, and thousands of private universities like it, are not Hillsdale College. Hillsdale long ago lost trust in federal and state government due to their efforts to use their partial funding as a means of politically leveraging the college. And therefore, it has refused all public monies ever since. 

Left-wing major colleges or universities have not done the same because they rightly assume the federal government shares their commitment to radical progressive change. And thus, Washington gives them free rein to discriminate in admission, housing, and hiring, as well as to suspend constitutional protections for faculty and staff—if in service to progressive-regressive agendas. 

But that was then, and this is now. If Stanford’s sordid law school psychodrama taught us anything, it was that the law school mob felt they could threaten, smear, scream, disrupt and shut down a public speaker and do so with complete impunity. And they were right on all counts. . . .

Hillsdale College has stood out for years as dedicated to offering a classical liberal arts education, including American history!  They can do so because they refuse all state and federal funding.  Our household subscribes to their newsletter Imprimus, which always contains a modified version of a recent lecture by a recognized conservative, such as VDH.  Read his column here.

# # #

Digital Currency Coming Your Way

 

Yesterday this blog posted a meme showing why digital currencies are such a bad idea.  And Dr Joseph Mercola is not optimistic about stopping them:

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Three large banks failed in a single week in March 2023, and the ripple effect could easily take down the entire banking system. The cascading bank failures began March 8 with the shut down and liquidation of the crypto bank Silvergate Capital. It had invested deposits in Treasury bonds, which lost value as interest rates were hiked to stem inflation
• March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed. It too was invested in government bonds, which again became a problem when customers began making large fear-based withdrawals. This was the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, and the largest since the financial crisis in 2008
• Spooked by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank customers withdrew more than $10 billion in the days that followed, resulting in the shutdown of Signature Bank on March 12
• Government regulators have promised to make customers of the two banks “whole” by insuring all funds, not just the first $250,000. Only select “too big to fail” banks will be eligible for this kind of special treatment. Small local banks will not be eligible
• The most likely outcome of this bailout system is a consolidation of banks until we’re left with just a small number of mega-banks. This consolidation, in turn, will facilitate the rollout of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), as the banking industry will be a tight-knit monopoly

The full story at Discern Report is here.

# # #

Digital Currency meme

The Free Thought Project meme on why converting to a Global Bank Digital Currency [GBDC] is a dangerous idea:

# # #

 

The Illusion of Choice

Laurie T. Vass is co- author with Thomas E. Vass of Reclaiming the American Democratic Impulse (2017). I had not heard of the title, and there were no reader reviews at Amazon.  She recently posted a reader comment at Conservative Treehouse that fills in more of the blanks in Sundance’s ongoing Uniparty exposés and explanations:

. . .Sundance states that,  

“both the DNC and RNC are private corporations with no affiliation to government. [The differences between the two private corporations] is NOT primarily ideological. In the modern era, the corporate priority first begins with a battle over who controls [the internal power] in each corporation.”

. . .

Our historical analysis begins around 1985, with two political party developments in America.

During this early era, the Democrats slowly transformed from a political party that promoted the financial interests of working class citizens, to a more overtly Marxist party, that sought to implement a Marxist regime in America.

In the case of Democrats, they abandoned the working class, and embraced the class war rhetoric of Marx.

The election of Obama, in 2008, completed the transition of the Democrat Party to an ideological party, intent on the overthrow of the American government.

Beginning around 1985, with the opening of China as a trading partner, Republicans abandoned the national economic sovereignty interest of growing the economic pie, in favor of an open-border globalism that directed the benefits of global trade to themselves.

As Sundance correctly points out, when the Republican Party transitioned to an overtly global corporatist orientation, working and middle class MAGA citizens lost a political voice within the Vichy Republican Party.

As Sundance stated,

“The RNC want to give the illusion of support for MAGA conservatism because they need the base voter, and they need to maintain the illusion of choice.”

Sundance’s posting titled “Mid-Tier Donor Class Very Worried About Ron DeSantis 2024 Management Agenda” is here.  Scroll down for reader comments including the one quoted above, or search the comments pages for “Laurie Vass”.  The extract above is a brief one from a much longer comment.  I don't know if I agree with her conclusions, but then, I have not read either her 2017 or her forthcoming book.

# # #