Another Instance Of Our Non-political Expert Regulators In Action

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  • In the Progressive utopia championed by Woodrow Wilson and his successors, government will iron out the imperfections in human affairs through the use of regulatory agencies run by non-political experts. Such people, being experts and completely non-political, would pose no reason for concern about abuse of power, because of course they would never seek go outside their proper regulatory portfolio to use their authority to stamp out the freedoms and speech of their political opponents on important topics of the day.

  • In the real world government regulators since the creation of their agencies have inevitably used their powers to disadvantage and silence political opposition. The last few years have seen this phenomenon taken to new levels of blatancy and aggressiveness.

  • Today comes news that another case raising similar issues has just been accepted by the Supreme Court.

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A Do-It-Yourself Demonstration Project Of Wind, Solar And Batteries Comes Nowhere Near Eliminating Fossil Fuels

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A Do-It-Yourself Demonstration Project Of Wind, Solar And Batteries Comes Nowhere Near Eliminating Fossil Fuels

  • Under the enlightened leadership of our expert bureaucrats in Washington and various state governments, we are embarked on a program to replace our functioning electricity generation system with an alternative system based on wind, solar, and energy storage.

  • We are told that this will be easy, and in fact cheaper than what we currently have.

  • Surely, if that is true for an entire country, it must be equally true for some small place like an island or a small town. Easiest of all for the demonstration would be an individual house, particularly if the house is surrounded by sufficient land to accommodate all the required elements of the system.

  • On October 26, the Daily Sceptic website featured a piece by an anonymous Australian author who has set up his own do-it-yourself wind/solar/storage system to supply electricity to two houses on a plot of land in a rural area of Victoria.

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The Food Insecurity Scam Is Even Worse Than The Poverty Scam

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The Food Insecurity Scam Is Even Worse Than The Poverty Scam

  • Periodically I post updates here about how more and more government money thrown at so-called “anti-poverty” programs never seems to reduce measured poverty even by a little. I call this phenomenon the “poverty scam.”

  • The persistent high rate of supposed “poverty” — in the face of well over a trillion dollars of annual spending supposedly intended to cure it — is then repeatedly used to sucker the voters and the Congress into another round of increases in the spending, none of which will ever reduce poverty as measured.

  • My latest post on this subject was on September 16, occasioned by the issuance from the Census Bureau of its “poverty” statistics for 2022. (That latest issuance of poverty statistics showed a large uptick in measured poverty despite an approximately 8% increase in the spending supposed to cure it.). For dozens of more posts on this subject, go to the Poverty tag in the Archive section.

  • And yet, among the categories of federal statistics that are cynically crafted to deceive and manipulate the public to support advocacy for growth of programs, there is a category that is even worse than “poverty,” and that is the category of “food insecurity.”

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Do We Really Know That Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cause Significant Climate Change?

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Do We Really Know That Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cause Significant Climate Change?

  • It’s by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such “greenhouse gases” cause significant global warming, aka “climate change”?

  • Based on the belief that an affirmative answer to that question is a universally accepted truth, our government has embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign to transform our economy by, among other things, eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation (without any demonstrated workable plan for the replacement), outlawing the kinds of vehicles we currently drive, suppressing fossil fuel extraction, banning pipeline construction, making all your appliances work less well, and much more.

  • Express any doubt about the causal connection between human activities and climate change, and you could very well get labeled as a “climate denier,” fired from your academic job, demonetized by Google or Facebook, or even completely ostracized from polite society.

  • But is there actually any real proof of the proposition at issue? In fact, there is not.

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The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council Has Petitioned The Supreme Court For Certiorari

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  • It’s the question that I know has been on the tips of the tongues of all Manhattan Contrarian readers: Will the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, after getting booted ignominiously out of the D.C. Circuit on grounds of standing, now continue its fight to overturn EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding by petitioning the Supreme Court for Certiorari?

  • The answer is YES. Our Petition for a Writ of Certiorari was filed on Wednesday, October 18, and is now available on the Supreme Court’s website.

  • Not that other strategies did not occur to us.

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