Scientific “consensus”

Seen on PowerLine’s “The Week in Pictures: Tuckered Out Edition”

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Wind, Solar, & Batteries: nope

Yesterday, we blogged on the Green Cult members, those environmental zealots who are actually up to something else.   As a follow-up, John Hinderaker at PowerLine explains why wind and solar power will “never work”:

Enormous amounts of money are being made by “green” fraudsters, utilities and politicians who tell us we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. In fact, no such transition is underway; fossil fuel consumption is higher than ever. And no such transition will take place, ever, either in America or anywhere else in the world.

Why? Because wind and solar are both obsolete technologies. They produce electricity less than one-half of the time, a fact that will never change. How can we run a modern economy on intermittent energy sources? We can’t.

If you ask a liberal that question, his answer will be “batteries.” He will admit that wind and solar work only occasionally, but that is no problem, he will tell you, because the electricity they generate can be stored in batteries for later use.

Power can be stored in batteries, of course. We all do this every day, storing tiny amounts on our laptops, smart phones and so on. But our energy demands are almost unfathomably large, and all of the batteries in the world don’t begin to meet those needs. My colleague Isaac Orr created this graphic, which compares energy consumption in just one state in one country, as of 2019, with projected battery storage in the entire world as of 2030. You might as well rely on pixie dust as on batteries:

Click to embiggen

Much more at PowerLine here.

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Student loan forgiveness: you get to pay more

 

Rick McKee’s cartoon seen on PowerLine’s "Week In Pictures"

The Democrats really do want more of your money.  At American Spectator, David Catron reports on the case before the Supreme Court concerning the cancelation of student debt; he begins:

Last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court concerning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan predictably focused on arcane legal theories such as the “major questions doctrine.” Relatively little time was devoted to the profoundly inequitable structure of the program. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch did note that it would provide benefits to certain favored persons while ignoring the very real costs it would impose on others, but no one mentioned a fact that will gall most taxpayers — it would cancel student loans for college dropouts.

Remarkably, the Biden administration and most Democrats see this as a selling point for the plan. The White House fact sheet puts it as follows: “Nearly one-third of borrowers have debt but no degree, according to an analysis by the Department of Education of a recent cohort of undergraduates.” The Democrats justify canceling these loans because tuition costs have risen, ignoring evidence that the loans have driven that increase. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) claims: “Up to 4 in 10 people with student loan debt weren’t able to graduate, many because of high costs.… Canceling student loan debt would change their lives.”

The problem is that the $400 billion program would also “change the lives” of millions of Americans for the worse. How? It will raise the stealth tax known as inflation. . . .

Read the rest here.

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“The Scream” updated

Seen at PowerLine’s Week in Pictures:

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Sending Abrams tanks to Ukraine

PowerLine’s "Week In Pictures" published this meme:

 

Hidden Pictures:  can you spot Sesame Street’s Purple Monster in the meme?

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EGGS: The New Contraband

Eric Lendrum at American Greatness has the headline:

Smuggling of Eggs Across Border Skyrockets Amid Rising Prices

PowerLine’s “The Week in Pictures” has the meme:

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Reasons to oppose Electric Vehicles

 

John Hinderaker at PowerLine shares some common sense objections to California's mad dash to electric vehicles (and yes, it's coming to Ohio also):

Are people finally starting to catch on to the fact that electric vehicles are a terrible idea? I hope so. Bjorn Lomborg makes the case in accessible form in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, EVs don’t even save much on CO2 emissions:

Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

What does that up to, in terms of climate?

If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

On that basis alone, the left’s mania to make us all drive electric vehicles is insane. But from there on, the story is all negative:

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

. . .

Left-wing governments are on a collision course with normal Americans. Governments want to force Americans to rely on wind and solar energy, but those sources can’t keep the lights on and are ruinously expensive. Similarly, governments want to force us all into electric vehicles, which are not as functional as gas-powered vehicles, despite being more expensive. And they are a net detriment to the environment. Lomborg is optimistic, perhaps more so than I am:

Read the rest here.

And Mr. Hinderaker didn’t even get to the problems with existing minerals required to produce the batteries, or the disposal of spent batteries, or the horrific damage done by strip mining to extract, say, the lithium (see aerial image at the top).

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Your weekend meme: First Ladies in Vogue

Seen on PowerLine’s The Week in Pictures (h/t Instapundit):

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Sophisticated Technology

Seen at PowerLine blog:

And why does the security cam image bring to mind all those photographs of UFO's?

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If "Build Back Better" was a swing set

 Meme of the day via PowerLine:

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Meme of the Day: Fauci & Monkeypox

 From PowerLine's mid-week in Pictures:

More fun here.

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President's Day today

 My kind of meme (h/t PowerLine)

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Freedom Convoy: The Meme

 

PowerLine’s “The Week in Pictures: Keep on Trucking Edition” has so many funny memes and headlines, it was difficult to choose.  Here’s one:

 

But go here for all the rest of them.

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Make Canada Great Again

 Seen at PowerLine's "Mid-Week in Pictures: Convoy Edition":

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The Treachery of VP Mike Pence

 

In the 2020 election, Mike Pence rubber-stamped the state vote certifications, when there were many members of Congress voting to reject some certifications and send them back to states where fraud was rampant (on video surveillance; in anomalies – eg. more votes than registered voters; sequentially numbered mail-in ballots, and so on). Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary provides a convenient summary and compilation video of the fraud; this blog posted on the documentary here. 

Paul Mirengoff argues at PowerLine that Pence had no authority to challenge suspected certifications, but I remain skeptical.  Even if Mr. Mirengoff is correct, and there were legal restraints on Pence, it hardly exonerates the former VP from all the sabotage during President Trump’s term, as Emerald Robinson outlines:

Whenever the subject of Mike Pence comes up in casual conversation, I always ask the same question: “Do you know Olivia Troye? Do you know Jennifer Williams? Do you know Katherine Seaman and Josh Pitcock?”

If you’re drawing a blank with these names then I’m sorry to inform you that you were not paying close enough attention to politics during the Trump Years. Also, you were not paying attention to my Twitter feed — because I was reporting on these problems all the time during the Trump Administration.

So, without further ado, let’s review all the evidence against Mike Pence. Trust me: there’s a lot of evidence.

1) Who Fired General Michael Flynn?

Let’s begin with Mike Pence’s least favorite question: “Why did you insist that President Trump fire his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in the opening days of the administration?” The official story is that Gen. Flynn had lied to Mike Pence about Flynn’s contacts with Russian diplomats. Nobody has bothered to ask Pence exactly how he was informed about Flynn’s private conversations. Think about it: somebody went to Pence with transcripts of Flynn’s calls, and told Pence that Flynn was a national security risk. Who would have access to such phone calls? Who would want to lie about the nature of those phone calls to get Flynn fired?

It almost certainly must have been disgraced FBI agent Peter Strozk.

It’s likely that Strzok was the one who pushed for VP Pence to fire Flynn because we know that Peter Strozk's assistant was Katherine Seaman — the wife of Mike Pence’s chief of staff Josh Pitcock. We also have the text exchanges between Strozk and Page discussing infiltrating the Trump White House in great detail. (This was the subject of an extraordinary letter from Senator Grassley and Senator Johnson to AG Bill Barr.) What did Pence know about the FBI’s attempts to spy on the Trump White House? Is it even possible that Mike Pence was totally unaware that his chief of staff’s spouse worked directly for the chief of the counter-espionage unit of the FBI?

We know that President Obama warned President Trump not to hire Flynn in 2016. We also know that Flynn himself believes that Obama advised Trump against hiring him because Flynn knew about the Obama administration’s role in spying on Trump’s presidential campaign. Removing Flynn as Trump’s National Security Advisor was a top priority for the Deep State.

In other words, Mike Pence was the first person to set the Russia Hoax into motion.

. . .

Much more by Ms. Robinson here. 

Mr. Pence is a swamp-dwelling, card-carrying Deep State.  I first suspected that when, as Governor of Indiana, he claimed to oppose and cancel Common Core in Indiana’s schools, while at the same time he was ushering in the same policies under a new name through the back door.  My alarm bell didn’t go off loudly enough. But as Ms. Robinson points out, I wasn’t paying close enough attention. 

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PowerLine: Border Apprehensions

The PowerLine blog has a weekly feature called “The Geek in Pictures.” This week’s “Blowout Edition” is here, and below is one of the charts/graphs that I thought I’d share with CTP readers:

Click to embiggen or go to the link above and scroll down.

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A Glimmer of Hope

 

Patriot Post meme via PowerLine

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is always a step ahead of everyone else. Here’s a chunk from his weekend column:

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics was downstream from pop culture.  Andrew’s ability to engage any audience that generally didn’t care about politics, while displaying the Machiavellian manipulators in a way that was brutally effective, made him an enemy to those who avoid sunlight.

What we are seeing amid college football games, and recently any venue where a large audience is assembling, is really quite remarkable.  The cultural shift within the modern political sphere was triggered by Donald Trump; his election was the biggest middle finger to the elites, and ultimately the scale of his support amid a global population that was disenfranchised is why they needed to eliminate him.

The leftist Marxist’s have power.  However, their unquenchable lust for power, specifically showcased in their COVID-19 reaction, has put them in a place where they are in power but losing the cultural argument.

Free people can only tolerate and internalize so much frustration before it starts to come out. Specifically, because frustration is now palpable anger, the sense that screams freedom has become snarky, raw, unapologetic and now often vulgar.

Yeah, it’s a weird thing to find alignment with vulgarity, but when your life and liberty is on the line… well, you fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s ark – and you appreciate anyone that stands beside you.

If  “F**k Joe Biden” bothers you, don’t watch this [video] . . .

I didn’t watch the video, but I am certainly following the phenomenon.  Full article with video is here.

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Inclusivity

This cartoon by Michael Leunig was posted in PowerLine's Week In Pictures:

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Better than the Bat SIgnal

. . .  election fraud, inflation, mask and vaccine mandates, interference with the free market, and now the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, all that and more explains why this image has been making the rounds:

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Cartoon of the Day

Powerline blog's regular "Week in Pictures" included this cartoon by Gary Markstein:

click to embiggen or click on the link above and scroll down a bit

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