September 06, 2022

Another Round Of Rolling Blackouts In California

September 06, 2022/ Francis Menton

This summer has seen repeated warnings in California that another round of rolling blackouts could be coming. (The last such round was in August 2020.). Somehow, before today, several close calls have been averted. But today, California’s luck seems to have run out. Even as I’m writing this post, California’s main utility PG&E has put some 525,000 customers on notice that rolling blackouts could be imposed this evening as the sun sets and power from solar arrays konks out.

Temperatures in California, particularly in the Bay Area, are indeed running unusually hot, although in most cases not all-time records.
You won’t be surprised to learn that one mainstream press source after another attributes the power shortage and resulting blackouts to “climate change.”
But the funny thing is, as hot as the temperatures are, they are no hotter than temperatures experienced this year — and indeed every year — in other states like Arizona and Texas. And yet those states are not having rolling blackouts caused by inadequate electricity on the grid.

September 04, 2022

Update On Europe's Self-Inflicted Energy Crisis

September 04, 2022/ Francis Menton

The Europeans thought they had come up with the perfect strategy to “decarbonize” their energy systems and save the planet.
Just build more and more wind turbines and solar panels, until you had plenty of electricity from those sources to power everything. Gradually close down the coal, natural gas and nuclear facilities along the way. And simultaneously suppress any and all domestic production of fossil fuels, because after all, soon we will not be needing those things any more.
As far as I can tell, nobody ever took even a moment to do the basic arithmetical calculations to figure out how much backup (from what?) or energy storage it would take to get through a year with a system powered principally by the wind and sun. Hey, we’re in a “climate emergency”! Such questions have been ruled out of bounds, not to mention morally reprehensible.
Let’s take a look at some of the latest developments.

September 01, 2022

September 01, 2022/ Francis Menton

One after another, people who spread information unfavorable to the Biden family, or to Biden Administration policies, get banned or suppressed on social media.
It actually started even before Biden got elected, with Twitter in October 2020 banning any re-tweet of the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, and Facebook suppressing dissemination of the same story. But after Biden took office the examples are legion. To name just a few: James O’Keefe of Project Veritas (pursuing the Ashley Biden diary story) was banned by Twitter in April 2021; noted climate and Covid vaccine skeptic Tony Heller got repeatedly suspended from Twitter in 2021; Covid vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson was banned by Twitter in August 2021; in April 2022 Twitter banned ads that it deemed “climate change propaganda,” which it identified based on their “contradicting” the “scientific consensus”; in July 2022 Gregory Wrightstone — Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition — got permanently banned from LinkedIn for disseminating charts that were based on data used by the IPCC. There are many, many more such examples.
Your first reaction might be, this isn’t right, but these social media companies are private actors, not subject to the First Amendment, so they are allowed to do this. And that would be true if they were acting on their own.
But gradually it has been coming out that they are not acting on their own.

August 30, 2022

August 30, 2022/ Jane Menton

President Biden’s plan to forgive $10K in student loans quickly became the biggest news of the last few weeks. Indeed, in what should be a sea of ugly news for Biden (Mar-a-Lago, anyone?), he’s clearly hoping debt forgiveness is his golden ticket.
Conservative and libertarian pundits have already covered many of the important reasons why the President “forgiving” or “canceling” debt is a terrible, not to mention unconstitutional, idea.
Meanwhile, I decided to have a little fun (or make myself a little enraged) by looking up the Buzzfeed twitter roundup on the subject to see what the youths are saying

August 27, 2022

August 27, 2022/ Francis Menton

The FBI — They’re the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
We rely on them to protect us from every sort of crook and bad guy, not to mention international terrorists. When they’re investigating something important, it’s understandable that they can’t disclose to the public what they’re up to. That would give away the game, and give the bad guys the chance to escape.
So we need to trust them, to let them operate mostly in secrecy, and just give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the right thing.
Boy, has that narrative gotten blown to smithereens over the past few years.

August 25, 2022

August 25, 2022/ Francis Menton

Every day it gets harder to keep up with the accelerating lawlessness of the Biden Administration. The basic strategy is, just do whatever the left wants, using all the vast powers and resources of the federal government, and dare anyone to try to stop you.
To mention just a few recent examples, one day it’s a multi-trillion-dollar transformation of the energy economy without Congressional authorization (perhaps slowed down by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA); the next day it’s holding meetings to pressure tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor the speech of political opponents; next it’s weaponizing the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and prosecute the leading political adversary on the flimsiest of pretexts. Additional examples could fill tomes.
But now we have what could well be the most audacious lawless act yet. I’m talking about the plan to “cancel” some hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, announced by President Biden on Wednesday August 24.