"Saving Democracy" By Prosecuting Political Adversaries: A Roundup

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"Saving Democracy" By Prosecuting Political Adversaries: A Roundup

  • Here in the U.S., with few exceptions, we have a commendable tradition that victorious politicians do not use the criminal justice system to prosecute or otherwise disable their rivals and adversaries.

  • At the presidential level, before Trump the two most prominent examples against that tradition were the prosecution of Aaron Burr by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and the prosecution of Eugene Debs by Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Otherwise, our defeated presidential candidates have gone peacefully to retirement.

  • But then, after Trump was defeated in 2020, that tradition was abrogated in rather spectacular fashion. . . .

  • Notable about all the Trump prosecutions is how completely flimsy were all the charges against him. The idea was rather transparently to use control of levers of government power to disable the main adversary in the political arena. Meanwhile, the people involved sanctimoniously wrapped themselves in a claim that they were “saving our democracy.”

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New York Times Breaks Taboo On Mentioning That Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother

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New York Times Breaks Taboo On Mentioning That Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother

  • It must be good to be a black, Muslim woman, the first such to get elected to Congress and, not incidentally, a Democrat and an avowed hater of the United States and of Israel. If you can check all those boxes, then you can commit the most overt and obvious frauds and scams, and the mainstream media will act in lockstep to cover up, suppress and minimize your wrongdoing.

  • But at some point the brazenness can become too much even for the New York Times. That appears to have happened in the past couple of days in the case of Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman from Minnesota.

  • Two plus weeks ago, on October 12, federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s house in Washington, D.C. The authorities have been rather tight-lipped about the nature of the underlying investigation, but numerous news outlets, both liberal and conservative, have had pieces citing multiple sources (generally anonymous) who indicate that the investigation relates in some way to immigration and/or marriage fraud committed by Omar.

  • One of those outlets is the New York Times.

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On El Hierro Island, At Least They Kept The Diesel Backup

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  • On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage).

  • The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23. In summary, the wind/storage system provided 56% of the island’s electricity use in the best year, and only 35% in the worst year.

  • During these years, the remainder of the island’s electricity — ranging from 44% in the “best” year for the wind system to 65% in the worst year — has been provided by a diesel generator. The wind/storage system has fallen far short of its stated goal of supplying all the electricity for the island. But at least they have kept the diesel generator around.

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Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By "Renewables"

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Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By "Renewables"

  • In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food.

  • Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.

  • At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?

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The New York Times Shows Democrats How To Run On "Energy Affordability"

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The New York Times Shows Democrats How To Run On "Energy Affordability"

  • In my post of October 7, I asked “How Can Democrats Possibly Run On Affordability?” The post specifically focused on energy affordability, and on consumer electricity prices, because, for reasons that I don’t understand, the price of electricity seems to be a big issue for Democrats in the upcoming elections.

  • The post cited easily-available data from the federal Energy Information Administration showing that, among the contiguous 48 states, there is a sharp divide between states run by Democrats — which have the highest prices — and those run by Republicans — which have the lowest prices. The six states with the highest prices consist of California plus five Northeastern states that have joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in an effort to intentionally drive up their consumer electricity prices. The twelve states with the lowest prices are all solidly Republican with the sole exception of purple Nevada (where the Governor is a Republican). Prices per kWh in climate-obsessed California and the Northeast are double and more the prices in many Republican-run states. If you study the issue even a little, it becomes obvious that the higher prices in the blue states are driven in part by higher taxes and more regulations, but particularly by so-called “climate” policies that in practice greatly drive up costs.

  • So how can you possibly turn this into an issue that somehow favors Democrats in the election on the issue of “affordability”? For the answer, I take you to the front page of yesterday’s print New York Times. . . .

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When Ignorant Ideologues Take Control Of Major Economic Decisions

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  • As previously mentioned, I have been reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on the history of China during its years under the rule of Mao Zedong (1949-76). Of the three books, the one covering the middle years of 1958-62 is titled “Mao’s Great Famine.” The name given by Mao and his gang to these years was “The Great Leap Forward.”

  • The story told in this book is the sort of critically important and easily-available information about how the real world works that all our newly-minted elite college graduates have somehow missed. The short version is that a clique of political ideologues with zero knowledge of how things are actually produced takes control of making the major economic decisions. They have what they think are brilliant ideas about how to transform the economy and do everything better. In short order, output collapses and people are starving.

  • It is impossible not to notice the close analogy between the events that led to China’s catastrophe and the ongoing energy disaster being imposed on various U.S. states and other Western countries by an equally ignorant clique of political ideologues.

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