Exploring the foundational idiocies of the Church of Fundamentalist Liberalism, including humanocentric global warming and other silly superstitions
GIVE TIL IT HURTS!
The BRICS countries are primarily 3rd world shitholes, commies (or both), or have petro dollars. They are not displacing the dollar, not today and not tomorrow. It’s a fantasy of the anti-American set and those caught up in the narrative of American decline.
The $ will not be displaced.
BRICS Currency Swap: Too Small and Complex to Dethrone the Dollar
He thinks just like a regular American. He makes it clear that he is an American, not an “african” American, just a plain American.
He is the North Carolina Lt. Governor and will be our next governor.
My prediction – he will be the best governor NC has ever had. He has no fear of commies.
Hattip: Liberty Daily
7First off, before we get to clearing yet another too-long-open browser tab, I just can’t resist running this highly apposite meme.
Gee, thanks so much, Jaux! Why, whatever would we do without you looking out for us poor Serf Class schlubs, anyway? And what do we have to do so’s we can find out quicker?
Okay, speaking of oddly-behaving gas tanks…
Would you buy a car with a shrinking fuel tank?
HAVING the technical knowledge of an amoeba, I’m not in any position to list the huge number of problems linked to electric vehicles (EVs) such as their eye-watering cost and their road- and car park-wrecking weight. There’s also their rare but potentially fatal tendency to turn into 2,000 degrees infernos due to a chain reaction known as ‘thermal runaway’. But I thought I’d ruminate for a moment on the differences between the power sources of EVs compared with petrol/diesel vehicles: an EV battery vs a petrol/diesel fuel tank.With an EV battery:
- the maximum range seems to be somewhere between 150 and 250 miles;
- you’re advised to charge it only up to 80 per cent; the battery degrades every time you charge it, thus reducing the range;
- when the battery needs replacing (supposedly after eight to ten years but probably earlier), you’ll need to spend over £10,000 on a new one, so you might as well scrap your EV;
- even a minor accident or bumping into a kerb may mean you have to buy a new £10,000 battery as it’s impossible to know whether the potentially explosive battery has been damaged;
- owing to the high replacement cost of EV batteries, insuring EVs tends to be much more expensive than a petrol/diesel car;
- many public chargers don’t work because thieves find it profitable to cut the cables to sell the copper.
With a petrol or diesel vehicle:
- the fuel tank gives about three times the range of an EV;
- you can fill the tank to 100 per cent of its capacity;
- the tank remains the same size and gives the same range however many times you fill it;
- even if you keep the vehicle for ten to 15 years, you’ll probably never need to buy a new fuel tank;
- small accidents or bumps are unlikely to do any damage to your fuel tank;
- thieves are unlikely to cut the fuel hoses in petrol stations to sell off the rubber.
Yet our rulers plan to force us all to buy expensive but largely useless EVs supposedly to save the planet from supposed (but non-existent) catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
Permit me to refer you to Mike’s Iron Law #149 and its accompanying Corollary A—what the hey, #213 also while you’re over there, it relates—if you wish to understand why this bizarre, seemingly nonsensical state of affairs progressed from over-the-top, non sequitur-ish tomfoolery to Amerika v2.0’s contemporary reality. Then see Mike’s Iron Law #873 for a broad, non-specific hint as to how it might be properly dealt with.
3
1I don’t care so much about this story per se, interesting though it surely is. I only intend to use it as a springboard for making another point entirely, for which a clue is provided in my bolded bit.
Earth’s Core Seems to Be Wrapped in an Ancient, Unexpected Structure
The most high-resolution map yet of the underlying geology beneath Earth’s Southern Hemisphere revealed something we previously never knew about: an ancient ocean floor that may wrap around the core.This thin but dense layer exists around 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the surface, according to a study published in 2023. That depth is where the molten, metallic outer core meets the rocky mantle above it. This is the core-mantle boundary (CMB).
“Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet, and we are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought,” said geologist Samantha Hansen from the University of Alabama when the findings were announced.
Understanding exactly what’s beneath our feet – in as much detail as possible – is vital for studying everything from volcanic eruptions to the variations in Earth’s magnetic field, which protects us from the solar radiation in space.
Guess we should feel pretty lucky that we already know everything there is to know about the Earth’s climate, then; good thing for us all that there’s nothing left to learn about that. Right, guys?
21And they always will be.
Buttigieg defends Biden’s EV strategy after question on how only 8 federal charging stations have been built
Buttigieg says Biden focused on making sure EV revolution is American-ledTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defended the Biden administration’s push to build half a million electric vehicle (EV) charging stations along U.S. highways by 2030 after being questioned about how just eight have been built since President Biden signed the legislation two years ago.
Buttigieg appeared Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” where he tried to ease doubts about reaching Biden’s goal of 500,000 chargers by the end of the decade when asked why it wasn’t happening more quickly.
“Now, in order to do a charger, it’s more than just plugging a small device into the ground,” the secretary said. “There’s utility work, and this is also really a new category of federal investment. But we’ve been working with each of the 50 states.”
“Seven or eight, though?” host Margaret Brennan said with a laugh.
“Again, by 2030, 500,000 chargers,” Buttigieg said. “And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built.”
See? Fret not, folks, Comrade Mr Secretary Buttplug is ON THE CASE!!! Assuming he’ll have any time, whilst also getting pregnant, giving birth, and breast chest-feeding “his” children, to deal with such trifling inanities as this charger grift, of course. Meanwhile, a commenter over at Insty’s joint notes a leeeetle problem.
My back-of-the-envelope math also indicates that building seven stations every two years will get us to Biden’s goal of 500,000 no later than the year 144,881 AD. Assuming we’re still using AD by then. 2030 doesn’t seem that far away now, does it?
Oof. Also, ouch. Hey, math is haaaaard. Who knew? Really, though, the underlying issue is going unmentioned.
Buttigieg said “the EV revolution will happen with or without us” and that Biden is focused on making sure the EV revolution is led by America, not by a competitor like China.
He said the charging stations are just one factor that will help Americans transition from gas-powered cars to electric; the other is lowering the cost of EVs for the consumer.
Bold mine, and horseshit of the purest ray serene. The “EV revolution” will assuredly NOT be “led by America,” contra whatever falsehoods the flailing, floundering Buttplug pukes forth. Fact is, this misleading Peter-puffery is a useful indicator of precisely where, how, and why we’ve gone so wrong: unlike previous world-altering, genuinely revolutionary* shifts organically driven from the bottom up thanks entirely to entrepreneurial creativity, ingenuity, and ambition (think Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, Edison’s incandescent light bulb, the internal-combustion engine, powered flight, among others), the hard-luck huckster Buttplug’s “EV revolution” is 100% Astroturf, forced on us Serf Class simps from the top down, whether we will or we nil—led by the government, not America.
Sorry, but this is not no way no how something to be celebrated, at least for any Real American not hungrily sucking at the drooping Überstadt teat. Such as, for example, Comrade Buttplug. On the bright side, though, maybe FederalGovCo will explain that mind-boggling “7 every 2 years=500k in 6” computation when the junta issues its next Five Year Plan. That ought to be a hoot.
*Hate to have to bust any bubbles here, but the very idea of a government-led “revolution” is a non sequitur, by definition an impossibility; sorry, but revolutions just don’t work that way. Call me pedantic, call me a language-Nazi, but revolutions aren’t done BY governments, they’re done TO them.
Open mouth, insert foot update! Jesus, it’s like the boob just can’t help himself.
In a surprising move, Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg didn’t blame an alleged increase in extreme turbulence impacting air travel on racism. During an interview on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” the embattled cabinet member instead chose to blame the problem on climate change.
“The effects of climate change are already upon us in terms of our transportation,” he said. “We’ve seen that in the form of everything from heat waves that shouldn’t statistically even be possible threatening to melt the cables of transit systems in the Pacific Northwest to hurricane seasons becoming more and more extreme.”
A recent study found hurricanes and typhoons are actually decreasing, but okay, Pete.
It’s always the same old song with these people over and over and over again, the song only has one note, and nary a one of ‘em can carry a tune in a slop bucket. Yet they will NOT stop singing the stupid thing, even as the audience stomps out with their hands clapped tightly over their ears. More tiresome than one of those interminable, multi-band “Louie Louie” marathons they used to do now and then as radio-station promos, that’s what it is.
MOAR EV follies update! A joke, and not a very funny one: Electric…FIRE ENGINES?!?
New Mexico Democratic Governor Michelle Grisham was recently excited to announce that the state’s Environment Department was awarding a nearly half-million dollar grant to Bernalillo County to partially finance the purchase of a new “all-electric” fire truck for their fire department. It was only a “partial” reimbursement because the projected cost to the county to replace its 1991 diesel fire engine with a Pierce Volterra battery electric fire engine was more than $1.8 million. The local fire chief was quoted as proudly saying, “There’s no cancer coming out of the tailpipe” of the new truck. So that’s a win for all concerned, right?
Not so fast there, chief. You have to read quite a ways down into the announcement to learn the uncomfortable truth about this purchase. The supposedly “all-electric” fire engine has a diesel engine in it. The pumps that actually deliver the water to put out fires run off of the diesel engine and the truck itself can run off of diesel when the battery inevitably runs out. So the entire description of “all-electric” is a farce.
What aspect of the “EV revolution” ISN’T a farce?
So why would these fire trucks still have diesel engines?
Elementary, Watson: because electric motors and batteries simply aren’t adequate to the kind of heavy-duty task required of pumper trucks, shitlib fantasies about Skittle-pooping unicorns notwithstanding.
They’re supposed to be eliminating fossil fuels to save us all from climate change, aren’t they? The answer should be fairly obvious. These are emergency response vehicles. If your neighbor’s EV can’t make it out of the driveway one morning because they couldn’t find a charging station or there was a blackout, they might miss a day of work. If the fire truck can’t do its job, buildings will burn down and people may die. It’s simply not worth the risk.
The water pumps on the fire trucks are massive. They have to be to move that much water so quickly over a sustained period of time. Also, the engine that powers the vehicle is far larger than the ones in most consumer vehicles, on par with the ones in big rigs. If there is a significantly large fire taking place, the pumps may be running for hours on end. EV batteries simply are not up to the job. If a conventional fire truck begins running low on diesel, a refueling truck can be brought over to fill up the tank in a few minutes. You can’t accelerate the battery recharging process.
Bad enough, sure, but is that all, you ask? Not hardly, I reply.
Here is another fun fact about these trucks, as pointed out by Larry Behrens, Communications Director for Power The Future. Those “all-electric” fire trucks cost 40 to 50 percent more than conventional, diesel models. The one that Bernalillo County purchased cost $1.8 million. That’s roughly $600,000 more than standard diesel truck costs and that bill was saddled on the taxpayers of the county as well as the entire state thanks to the Governor’s “generous” grant. (It’s funny how these politicians are always able to be so generous with your money, isn’t it?)
Wait, so you’re telling me you feel that Saving Mother Gaia from A) trace atmospheric gases essential for plant life; B) gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and C) efficient, reliable, affordable modes of transportation for everyday Americans isn’t worth paying any price, going to any lengths imaginable? To quote Saint Greta of Thunberg: HOW DARE YOU!!! Oh, and speaking of that glowering, insufferably self-righteous nitwit, get a load of this:
Doom Goblin Greta? Bless my soul, how I do love it! Expect to see that one regularly from here on out, gang. I’ve been sitting on this mad-genius Tweet for a couple weeks now, just waiting for the right time to use it, and finally, it has come.
31“Is Biden About To Declare Himself Climate Dictator?” Waitwaitwait, I thought he DID that already.
Democrats have already made it clear that they will stop at nothing – nothing – to prevent Donald Trump from winning in November. So, we aren’t surprised to read reports that President Joe Biden might declare a “climate emergency” this year in hopes that it gooses his reelection odds. Never mind that such a declaration would put the U.S. right on the path to a Venezuela-style future.
Late last week, Bloomberg reported that “White House officials are weighing whether to declare a national climate emergency several months out from the 2024 election.”
Let’s leave aside the entirely fatuous notion that there is anything even remotely constituting a climate “emergency.” What would be the basis for such a declaration? The number of hurricanes, fires, floods? None of these has been trending upward. Death rates from natural disasters are a tiny fraction of what they were 60 years ago, and lower than they were 20 years ago. Food production is way up.
But Biden has already used the “climate crisis” as an excuse to impose a draconian electric vehicle mandate on the country, attack a host of household appliances, pour billions into “clean energy” scams, and more.
As Bloomberg notes, declaring a climate emergency “could enable the president to halt or limit crude exports for at least a year at a time, suspend offshore drilling, and throttle the movement of oil and gas on pipelines, ships, and trains.”
Apparently all that is not enough “newfound authority” for Biden’s minions.
Whatever you think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he is one of the few who has been outspoken about the dangers the COVID precedent set.
“We’ve now established a precedent in this country – they suspended the First Amendment: religion; freedom of association when they did the lockdowns,” he told Fox News.
“[They restricted] freedom of speech. They banned jury trials against vaccine companies – that’s [a violation of] the Seventh Amendment. They abolished property rights [which violates the] Fifth Amendment [when] they closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, although there was no pandemic exception in the United States Constitution.”
Not that I hold any truck with a great many of his views, but hey: when the man’s right, he is damned well right, clear down to the friggin’ bone and with big ol’ bells on.
Declaring a climate emergency would give Biden the ability to control anything that uses energy – which means literally all human activity – in the name of fighting this emergency.
If Biden were to declare a “climate emergency” and if – God forbid – it helps him win reelection, there will be little hope for the future of this nation.
What, you mean there still IS some? I musta missed a meeting, or something.
I repeat: this isn’t about the climate, nor about humanity being good stewards of our natural enviroment, nor about saving Mother Gaia. It’s not about animal/plant/insect species going extinct, nor about reducing pollution, CO2, and/or industrial emissions. Nor is it about polar ice caps shriveling away before our very eyes. It will assuredly NOT create good jobs, save boucoup money, revitalize the economy, or enrich/empower a living soul aside from the ProPol-class and proven-failure “green energy” concerns they choose to shower FederalGovCo cash upon as the gentle rain—companies, mind, which have no hope of surviving absent government largesse.
No, the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ bunco is really about the same old-same old: POWER, and CONTROL. Always was, always will be. Period fucking dot.
Update! Tell me the one again about how Biden hasn’t declared himself Climate Dictator, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.
President Joe Biden and his administration have taken over 200 actions against the U.S. oil and natural gas industry as energy prices have gone up, according to a new report.
“President Biden and Democrats have a plan for American energy: make it harder to produce and more expensive to purchase,” the Institute for Energy Research states in a new report. “Since Mr. Biden took office, his administration and its allies have taken over 200 actions deliberately designed to make it harder to produce energy here in America.”
The analysis highlights actions Biden took on his first day in office, listing them chronologically through March of this year. The first act was canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, issuing a moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and revoking Trump administration executive orders that decreased regulations in order to expand domestic production.
Within a week of being in office, Biden issued additional moratoriums on new oil and gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters and imposed new regulations related to permitting and leasing practices, which were tied up in the courts for years. It was not until last month that a federal court upheld the first oil and natural gas lease sale on federal lands. Last December, the Fifth Circuit also ruled that Gulf lease sales must go forward.
Other actions ahead of the midterm elections include threatening to tax the oil and natural gas industry, blaming them for profiteering. Roughly six months before the general election, his administration has proposed $110 billion tax hikes on oil, natural gas and coal. In response, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led a coalition of 24 senators expressing “grave concern” about his “continued hostility towards American energy production.”
Even if Pedo Peter hasn’t expressly said it in the exact words, he’s definitely talking the talk and walking the walk. Which oughta be plenty enough for anybody, I should think.
11DOG BITES MAN: the climate can and does change. Indonesian “transgender” hookers hardest hit.
No, really.
How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers
There’s an article which I didn’t bother to read, for the obvious reasons: 1) I don’t give a tinker’s damn, and 2) it’s all just made-up bullshit anyhow.
22This level of stupid really oughta be actually, physically painful. Or, y’know, as I proposed the other day, punishable by execution.
Not Satire: U.S. Senate Candidate Blames Climate Change for NJ Earthquake
Oh, it’s satire all right. Whether or not the BiQ (Bimbelina in Question) knows it, it’s satire all to hell and gone.
(America First Report)—There’s dumb. Then there’s Democrat-Dumb. But even higher on the list of total idiocy is Democrat-Climate-Cultist-Dumb and a U.S. Senate candidate from New Jersey just hit this pinnacle with the worst earthquake reaction of the week.
Christina Amira Khalil quickly deleted her offending Tweet but not before getting lambasted by the masses.
Because of COURSE she did; they always delete ‘em, every single time. The Bee’s response, happily, is still up.
Gonna have a call with my Babylon Bee writers to figure out how we failed to come up with “the earthquake was caused by climate change” before the libs did https://t.co/oxeQpVjZAQ
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann)
Writers at the Bee really do have the toughest jobs in the world, don’tchathink? Back to Rucker for more hi-larity.
Technically, she’s running for the Green Party but the vast majority of her support will come from Democrats. But if any of those voters are on Twitter they might think twice before voting for this “moron.”
Gee, ya think? Why would they, prithee tell? After all, Amira-Kahlil-Achmed-Jibroni just proved herself to be One Of Them; she’s right up the D卐M☭CRATs’ ally. Running in deepest-blue Noo Joisey, the vacuous twat will probably win in a landslide. Honestly, I kinda hope she does—the entertainment value will be off the charts with this semi-sentient whackadoodle. Oh, just THINK of the fun we’ll have!
11Apropos one of the memes from Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday email, to which I am a subscriber, which I’ll append at the end of this post so’s none of y’all will miss out.
Going electric requires electricity. Who knew?
A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’.Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.
One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.
Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.
Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent. Utilities all over the US are busy building gas-fired power plants to meet rising demand for electricity, when the whole point of this exorbitant energy ‘decarbonisation’ is to stop burning the likes of gas. The Times calls it an ‘ironic twist’ that the demand for electricity from green technology is imperilling the whole point of green technology, but I call that instead ‘wholly foreseeable’. And I call this comical: one Kansas utility is keeping a coal-fired plant online that it had planned to retire – the better to power a giant EV battery factory.
Lots more to this one too, read all of it. Being a Spectator UK article it’s paywalled, although for some reason the link got me access to the entire article just this once. If it doesn’t work for you, try running the URL through either 12ft Ladder, archive.is, or the venerable Wayback Machine, that orta do the trick. If all else fails, simply disable javascript in your preferred web browser’s settings until you’ve finished reading; JS is how these paywall nuisances work in the first place.
Oh yeah, almost forgot the meme:
Of course, as CF Lifers already know, it IS “just pretend.” The stupid, self-defeating EV push isn’t really about Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ or anything else but what it always and forever is; say it with me one time, people: Power, and Control. Personal vehicles are the front-line face of liberty and individual autonomy, and FederalGovCo hates that kind of thing to the very marrow of its bones.
31We the People gave the wrong answer, so now the dictator steps in to correct the mistake.
Biden Administration Issues Rule That Would Phase Out Gas Cars
The Biden administration has issued its final rule governing tailpipe emissions that will force automakers to phase out gas cars by requiring up to 60% of new cars sold by 2032 to be EVs or hybrids. The emissions standards are so draconian that only a fleet dominated by EVs will meet the government’s standards.The New York Times calls it “the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history.” It’s also virtually guaranteed to keep millions of Americans out of the new car market and create enormous chaos on the roads. The infrastructure, including enough charging stations and mechanics to service tens of millions of electric vehicles, simply won’t be there.
But in the name of “battling climate change,” no price is too steep, no inconvenience too stupid to endure.
“Three years ago, I set an ambitious target: that half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 would be zero-emission,” said Mr. Biden in a statement. “Together, we’ve made historic progress. Hundreds of new expanded factories across the country. Hundreds of billions in private investment and thousands of good-paying union jobs. And we’ll meet my goal for 2030 and race forward in the years ahead.”
“They may wish for us all to drive E.V.s or no cars at all, but at the end of the day that’s not their decision,” said Elizabeth Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana. “There is a limit to their authority to remake society in their own vision and the court has realized that.”
Oh, has it? Has it REALLY? Perhaps somebody needs to remind them of it, then. See Barry’s post below for more.
Amusingly, it’s all bad. As per usual, Buck Throckmorton has it all gathered together in the usual handy, dandy, and convenient spot, closing out this edition’s festivities with a pluperfect example of what sane sorts are talking about when they make sport of those “unintended consequences” brought inevitably on in the wake of shitlib presumptuousness, arrogance-in-ignorance, and mulish disregard for the real-world consequences of their disastrous policies.
Electric vehicles are significantly heavier than their gasoline-powered equivalents, up to 50% heavier in some cases. Aside from damaging roads and putting parking garages at risk, the force of a moving EV is also more than many guardrails can withstand.
“Crash tests indicate nation’s guardrail system can’t handle heavy electric vehicles” [AP – 01/31/2024]
Last fall, engineers at Nebraska’s Midwest Roadside Safety Facility watched as an electric-powered pickup truck hurtled toward a guardrail installed on the facility’s testing ground on the edge of the local municipal airport. The nearly 4-ton (3.6 metric ton) 2022 Rivian R1T tore through the metal guardrail and hardly slowed until hitting a concrete barrier yards away on the other side.
Barriers along the medians of divided highways serve to keep out of control vehicles from crossing over into oncoming traffic, thus preventing high-speed, head-on collisions. That simple safety mechanism has saved a tremendous number of lives. Thanks to the “EV transition,” we’ll just have to get used to mangled cars and mangled bodies due to head-on highway collisions again.
Ooookay, then. Gotta admit, as steadfast a derider of the most recent iteration of the recurrent CPC (coal powered car) pipe-dream as I’ve always been, even I never thought of that one before. But hey, saving Mommy Gaia from the planetary havoc inflicted by those horrible, terrible, double-plus-ungood “fossil fuels” (which are created in the course of Her own natural processes, by the by) is worth any price we must pay, right, idiots?
I mean, otherwise shitlibs might have to own up to being backasswards and wrong yet again, and the grown-ups might smack their hand, tell them to shut up, and make them go sit in the Naughty Kid corner and think things over for a few hours. Why, it’s just so darn UNFAAAIIIIR!!! Can’t have that, now can we?
To the surprise of precisely no one, Mordor on the Potomac kangaroo court rules that, in Amerika v2.0, there is no right to freedom of speech.
A Bad Day for America
As many of you already know, a Washington, DC jury today found the Defendants (Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg) liable for defamatory speech and reckless disregard of provable facts. Putting aside the monetary damages, the real damage done by this case is to every American who still believes in the First Amendment.The precedent set today, and as alluded to by Justice Alito when the case was petitioned before the U.S. Supreme Court, means that disagreement and/or criticism of a matter of public policy — the founding principle of this country — is now in doubt. And should you choose to give voice to any dissent, you can brought before a jury, held responsible, and fined.
Think this is just rhetoric? Consider, Mark Steyn is a member of the media. As such, he is supposedly afforded First Amendment protections. If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for every day citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in DC or Montana — anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing.
Gee, what ought Real Americans to do about that, I wonder? I can make an excellent guess at what we actually WILL do, alas. And it disgraces us far worse than the liberty-haters on that DC jury have just disgraced themselves, although those morons are much too goddamned stupid to know they have—or care, either. Further details:
The D.C. Circuit Court has ruled: Commentator Mark Steyn and space blogger and sometime PJ contributor Rand Simberg, after 13 years of legal maneuvering funded by a dark money group…
…are indeed liable for defaming Michael Mann by reporting on the way he was lying about being a Nobel laureate and engaging in a concerted effort to defame other climate scientists — including accusing Judith Curry of sleeping her way to the top, using statistical methods to generate the results he wanted (research malpractice for mere mortals).
For which he was awarded $1 each from Steyn and Simberg in compensatory damages.
This would be a laughable award, except the jury then piled on punitive damages: $1,000,000 from Steyn and $1,000 from Simberg.
Mann’s attorneys made a play for the D.C. jury and cashed in.
As will most other shitlib liars who go venue-shopping and end up hitting the big Wheel of Juridical Fortune jackpot.
511This one to the Pipeline website.
Four years ago, we launched this website in the interests of confronting the consistent misrepresentations of the energy industry by a small but powerful coterie of anti-civilizational cultural Marxists. They go by many anodyne names, most notably “environmentalists,” but as their behavior since the first “Earth Day” on April 22, 1970 — Lenin’s birthday, by sheer happenstance! — has demonstrated, their real purpose is not “saving the planet” but instituting a global rollback of Western civilization, its attainments, and its creature comforts. Worming their way into government, charities, and private enterprise, and by dint of repeated media pounding, they have managed to upend our traditional notions of society in the service of their neo-Communist ideals.
The hell with them, we say.
Earth Day was the useful-idiot brainchild of Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who proclaimed it in order to force environmentalism onto official Washington’s desk. President Nixon dutifully followed along, creating the Environmental Protection Agency later that year. Its early supporters were acting under the influence of a notorious crank, Rachel Carson, whose wholly unwarranted campaign against DDT has condemned millions to death. Among them was the malevolent Ira Einhorn, one of the participants at the first Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia who later murdered and composted his girlfriend, Holly Maddux — an early adopter of recycling:
It wasn’t until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers. Although Einhorn was only the master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day event, he maintains that Earth Day was his idea and that he’s responsible for launching it. Understandably, Earth Day’s organizers have distanced themselves from his name…
In other words, “environmentalism” was from the start a marginal movement of purists, predators, and psychopaths. In the fifty-plus years since they unleashed their crackpot campaign to “save the earth” (as if puny mortals had to the power to do so), they might have succeeded in clearing the skies above Los Angeles and partially detoxifying the Hudson River — their two principal cities — but at what cost? The slightest puff of smoke from a chimney (not to mention a cigarette) throws them into paroxysms of fear and rage, a herd of cows gives them conniption fits, and even the thought of your exhaling drives some of them mad, even though the CO2 we breathe out adds net-zero to the ecosphere. They are in fact triggered by any sign of life or human activity, and the net-zero carbon future they so devoutly pray to the winged hermaphrodite Baphomet for would in practice mean that we’re all dead.
In short, extreme “environmentalism” is an instigated, de facto suicide cult. Indeed, it’s not really “environmentalism” at all, but a neo-totalitarian nihilist movement that deals with opposition in the same way all Leftist movements do: by banning it, outlawing it, demonizing it, proscribing it, destroying it. Like Dracula suddenly confronted with a crucifix, Leftists froth and foam at the slightest challenge to their claim to be on “the right side of history,” as if history had a side, and they promote “climate alarmism” with the zeal of an End Times evangelist.
So let me blunt: there is no “climate catastrophe,” full stop.
From this beginning, we have gradually expanded our purview to include the Covid Hoax, all its attendant loss of freedom, and the naked fist of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party state slamming into the body politic. This astounding bit of medical effrontery — essentially, replacing the seasonal flu with a one-year-only junior version of the Black Death — brought forth the foolish and dangerous vaccines, untested lab experiments on people all over the world, that have since killed untold numbers via their deadly side effects.
However many lives they “saved,” it wasn’t worth it.
Much more at the link, of which you should read the all. Congrats to you, Mike, and to all your fellow contributors, editors, go-fers, flunkies, and sundry hangers-on. Y’all do good work.
Speaking strictly for myself, I am no more likely to “celebrate” Earth Day than I am to observe…oh, whaddyacallit, the day we’re all supposed to Save Gaia© by turning off all the lights for a couple of hours that night? Yeah, that one, whatever it is. In fact, I usually turn on every light in the damned house instead, right down to opening the oven, microwave, and laundry-dryer doors for the prescribed period so as to get their interior bulbs alight also.
Because FUCK you, that’s why.
21
1No big surprise here, I shouldn’t think.
The lying liars who talk about climate change know that they’re spouting bullshit.
More than 90 percent of NOAA’s temperature monitoring stations have a heat bias, according to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, author of climate website Watts Up With That, and director of a study that examined NOAA’s climate stations.“
And with that large of a number, over 90 percent, the methods that NOAA employs to try to reduce this don’t work because the bias is so overwhelming,” Mr. Watts told The Epoch Times.
“The few stations that are left that are not biased because they are, for example, outside of town in a field and are an agricultural research station that’s been around for 100 years…their data gets completely swamped by the much larger set of biased data. There’s no way you can adjust that out.”
The article starts with the claim from the Useless Nations about how if the planet temperature goes up by 1.5 degrees C, then we’re all going to die.
Uh, no. There are three periods in human history when the temps went up by more than 2 degrees C. The Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period. I would point out that all three of those periods corresponded with increased human growth and technology, not less. Also, no massive planet shattering cataclysms either.
Now add in data that is blatantly biased. The whole Global Warming Climate Cooling Change cult falls apart like a junkie who hasn’t gotten a fix in 24 hours.
Well, naturally. But then, what else would any reasonably well-informed, aware person expect from them other than a perfervid aversion to facts, truth, and observable reality? FederalGovCo lies so much, so continually, it’s gotta be pretty tough for ‘em by now to even realize they’re doing it at all, forget about owning up to it and trying to do better. Dishonesty, deceit, and overweening bumptiousness are the Government Grey Man’s default response at this point, regardless of topic or context: reflexive, instinctive, as if those ignoble traits were hard-coded into their DNA.
My wise old grandma put it best: they’d rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand flatfooted and tell the truth. That a great nation could have somehow produced such horribly diseased specimens has to be one of the most grotesque ironies in the human tragicomedy.
31Buck Throckmorton has rapidly become the go-to guy for EV news, debunkings, and unpleasant realities, and there’s a very good reason for that. To wit:
Welcome to 2024! Since New Year’s Day one year ago, the “electric vehicle transition” has gone from being a foregone conclusion to being a rolling failure. Auto manufacturers who bought into the hype are looking at a catastrophic financial miscalculation, and typical car drivers have gone from being curious (at best) to being generally negative about purchasing EVs. I believe that the conservative media’s pushback against EVs has had a considerable impact.
In other words, 2023 was a very good year – a year in which we turned opinion against electric vehicles. The people who want a boutique, status-symbol EV can continue to buy Teslas. (But can we please kill off the taxpayer subsidies for Tesla?) For all the rest, let 2024 be the year when legacy automakers throw in the towel on the eco-communist EV experiment.
For today, let’s do our periodic update on the EV Follies…
“Ford cutting 2024 F-150 Lightning production plans by half, suppliers told; The news comes amid an industrywide pullback in EV investment due to slower-than-expected sales growth.” [Automotive News – 12/11/2023]
Ford Motor Co. is dialing back planned output of the electric F-150 Lightning pickup by half next year because of “changing market demand,” a steep pullback of a high-profile nameplate the automaker spent most of this year working to build in larger numbers.
Although I’ve enjoyed writing about how emphatically consumers have rejected Ford’s flagship EV, in fairness I should point out that the Ford F150 Conflagration Lightning is a spectacularly awful vehicle. Aside from its tendency to burst into flames, it performs poorly at towing, hauling for distance, and operating in the cold – the basic functionalities that are expected of a pickup truck.
The buried lede in this story isn’t that Ford is cutting weekly production of its electric pickup from 3,200 units per week to 1,600 units per week, rather it’s that Ford’s executives still think there is a market that will absorb 1,600 of these abominations per week.
*****
It’s not just Ford that can’t sell its EVs. Half of Buick dealers would rather surrender their franchises than have to sell General Motors’ atrocious EV offerings.
“GM buys out nearly half of its Buick dealers across the country, who opt to not sell EVs” [Detroit Free Press – 12/20/2023]
GM’s awful executives, with little understanding of automobiles or their customers’ preferences, think they can simply dictate what consumers should buy. GM dealers, who actually understand automobiles and what their customers want, know better.
General Motors said nearly half its Buick dealers took buyouts this year rather than invest in selling and servicing electric vehicles as the automaker’s brands transition to all electric by 2030.
That means GM will end 2023 with about 1,000 Buick stores nationwide, down 47% from where it started the year.
*****
General Motors is rolling out an electric version of its popular Chevrolet Blazer sport utility. Well, it’s trying to, but not very successfully.
“2024 Chevy Blazer EV sales are already halted over software issues” [Elektrek – 12/26/2023]
Dozens of potential customers will have to keep waiting.
Ah well, I guess it’s nice to know it will impinge on mere dozens of the poor, pitiful fools; could be worse, could be hundreds. Nice also to see a few major manufacturers finally pushing back against being force-fed this fascistic, auto industry-killing program of FederalGovCo’s devising, instead of just lying back and taking it without demur as they have been up till now. Lots, lots more disincentives to buy into the goobermint’s credulity-straining propaganda push for these abominable, exorbitantly overpriced boat-anchors over at the Ace Place.
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