Starting To Notice That The Energy Transition Is Not Happening

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Starting To Notice That The Energy Transition Is Not Happening

  • Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates.

  • Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real?

  • No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is obvious and easily tracked. But a code of silence has enveloped the progressive media, commanding that no one is allowed to notice.

  • A small crack in the wall of silence suddenly happened in the New York Times on March 14.

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Can Things Get Any Worse In Haiti?

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Can Things Get Any Worse In Haiti?

  • For those interested in why some countries become wealthy while others remain in extreme poverty, Haiti is one of the most important case studies.

  • Despite being only a few hundred miles from the U.S. mainland, and even closer to Puerto Rico, with investment capital readily available and unlimited opportunities for trade, Haiti has essentially no economic development and is one of the poorest countries in the world.

  • And instead of improving, conditions in Haiti only get worse. The past few weeks have seen yet a new extreme low point, with the Prime Minister locked out of the territory and the country taken over by armed gangs.

  • At this blog I have returned repeatedly to the subject of Haiti over the years, in the attempt to understand how things could have gone, and continue to go, so terribly wrong.

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Update On The Good And The Bad Settler Colonialists

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  • Every year millions of people move from one country in the world to another with the intent to remain permanently in the destination country.

  • Generally such people then congregate in the destination country among others who have come from the same place of origin. In other words, they form colonies of settlers. According to the normal meanings of the words, they are “settler colonialists.”

  • So how should these “settler colonialists” be treated upon arrival by their destination countries?

  • Oddly, the political left has designated some of the settler colonialists as heroes deserving of an enthusiastic welcome replete with lavish taxpayer-funded benefits — free housing (at least temporarily), free medical care, free education for the kids, even cash handouts for food and incidentals; while other settler colonialists have been designated by the same leftists as the ultimate evil.

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Why Does No One Protest The Ongoing Slaughter Of Christians By Muslims In Nigeria?

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  • What is it about Israel that inspires that special intense hatred and anger among the cadres of the left? “Anti-semitism” is a description of the phenomenon, and an appropriate one, but tells us nothing about the causes, and particularly does not explain why among all the conflicts in the world this one dispute should be the focus of all the left’s energy.

  • Yesterday it was more of same here in New York City. The New York Post reports this morning on well-organized protests yesterday that blocked various bridges and a tunnel that cross the rivers into Lower Manhattan. The headline is “Anti-Israel protesters create commuter chaos at three NYC bridges, Holland Tunnel — over 330 taken into custody.”

  • There is no shortage in the world of behavior that does clearly fit the definition of the word genocide without any need to contort its meaning. But for some reason you won’t find the Democratic Socialists of America or Susan Sarandon or any other leftist group uttering a peep about these real genocides.

  • For Exhibit A, how about the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria?

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (11) -- Still Waiting For The Bribery Charges

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  • Yesterday, Hunter Biden was finally indicted — on tax charges. Here is a copy of the indictment, filed by Special Counsel David Weiss in the Central District of California, and signed by his principal deputy Leo Wise. The nine counts include three felonies.

  • The indictment makes for moderately entertaining reading. The gist is that Hunter Biden, rather than paying taxes of about $1.4 million that he acknowledged he owed for years 2016-19, instead “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle.” Well, we all knew that.

  • A more important question is why it has taken until now to produce an indictment for crimes that were this obvious and on which the statute of limitations was running.

  • So where are the bribery charges?

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Another Conflict In Which The Left Has No Interest: Venezuela/Guyana

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Another Conflict In Which The Left Has No Interest: Venezuela/Guyana

  • The response by Israel to the October atrocities of Hamas seems to have roused the international Left into a furious frenzy. Widespread demonstrations supporting the Gazans’ slaughter continue on a daily basis in major cities around the world and, especially, on university campuses. The demonstrations feature thinly- or not-so-thinly-veiled calls for elimination of Israel as a state, and for violence against Jewish people. The demonstrators call the Jews every horrible thing they can think of, the very worst in their vocabulary being “settler colonialists.”

  • Meanwhile, other comparable conflicts go on around the world without even a hint of interest from the same international Left. In this post on October 11 I discussed the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where at that very moment the Azeris were in the process of completely expelling a large community of Armenians from their historical homeland in a section of the Caucasus region called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians have apparently continuously occupied the area since well before the time of Christ, and converted to Christianity as a nation in 301 A.D. Encyclopedia Britannica dates the arrival of the Azeris (Muslims) from Central Asia around the 9th to 11th centuries A.D. Doesn’t that make the Armenians “indigenous” and the Azeris “settler colonialists”? You will be hard pressed to find a handful of news articles covering this situation, let alone even one tiny demonstration on a college campus.

  • And now consider the conflict between Venezuela and Guyana.

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