Category: folly

Categories
crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Spray-​Painting Stonehenge

Last month, members of Just Stop Oil, devoted to “climate activism” — a way of coping with weather that goes way beyond using shelter, culverts, coats and umbrellas — were arrested for an unsolicited paint job. 

They spray-​painted Stonehenge.

The group says that mankind is doomed unless we stop using fossil fuels. Not instantly! That would be crazy. By 2030.

According to a Just Stop Oil spokesman, “Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas will result in the death of millions.” But if we stop, the climate will spare us.

Their website says that fossil fuels are right now “killing millions around the world.” (No mention of any lives saved by, for example, fossil-​fuel-​provided heat in wintertime.)

Worse is to come. The contours of apocalypse are elaborated on a helpful /​genocide/​ page of the site. “Scientists warn of untold suffering and death, of the collapse of whole nations, and the eradication by manmade global heating of entire peoples and cultures.”

I hope I need not stress that not all “scientists” have received this fact-​free revelation.

What will cause the mass slaughter? More weather, sometimes extreme weather? The kind of thing that we use fossil fuels to cope with and protect ourselves from? And for which, barring much wider development and acceptance of nuclear power than we are likely to see any decade soon, there is no reliable substitute?

You can wash the paint off Stonehenge. Bringing irrational fantasists to reason is a much tougher job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Cold Truth

One of the climatic shifts supposed to be happening to our traumatized planet is the melting of polar ice into huge puddles of slush, with maybe a few polar bears helplessly drifting on the dwindling ice floes of a rising sea.

The alleged calamities of various alleged major climatic changes are allegedly due solely to human civilization. We can render the latter doctrine more plausible if we ignore all the major variations of climate that transpired for millions of years before mankind and industrial civilization showed up.

Anyway, if polar ice were indeed melting away over the long term, we could argue about the causes and effects.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening.

According to research at the University of Copenhagen using photographs and satellite data, the glaciers of Antarctica have been pretty stable over the last 85 years or so. (The SciTechDaily article about the findings calls this stability an “Antarctic Anomaly.”)

With the help of modern computer technology and aerial photographs going back to 1937, the researchers managed to track how the glaciers of East Antarctica have changed over the decades.

They found that “the ice has not only remained stable but also grown slightly over the last 85 years, partly due to increased snowfall.… While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10 – 20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance.”

Uh oh.

Chicken Little never had it so tough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability folly political economy

Inflation & the Infirm Incumbent

Joe Biden, inflation, economy

“From President Joe Biden’s point of view, Americans ought to be thrilled with the recent trends in inflation,” writes Eric Boehm at Reason, who quotes the president: “Wages keep going up and inflation keeps coming down.”

True enough, but, Mr. Boehm goes on, “pointing at the charts and regurgitating economic figures doesn’t seem to be as convincing as the president might hope.”

You’ve seen the left-​of-​center memes mocking Americans for thinking the economy is bad when it is, instead, g‑gr-​great!

But prices for food and gasoline, after the big bulge caused by all those COVID checks and subsidies, did not go back down to previous levels. And rising wages after the “Great Suppression” of the lockdowns seem at best a verypartial return to better times.

Boehm offers some context. “It makes sense that the recent run of inflation would leave a psychological scar. After all, the peak inflation rate of 9.1 percent in June 2022 was not only the highest annualized rate seen in more than four decades, it was also more than twice as high as the average inflation rate in any year since 1991.…” And inflation has not stopped. “In March, the annual inflation rate was 3.5 percent. Yes, that’s 60 percent lower than the peak rate in June 2022, but that’s still higher than the average annual rate in every single year between 1991 and 2021, except for 2008.”

And then there’s the higher interest rates, which, Boehm plausibly asserts, compounds our perceptions that “inflation is a major problem.”

This is a huge issue for Biden. Boehm cites the political lore: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” and notes that, “unfortunately for Biden, his task in the run-​up to November’s presidential election is explaining to people that they shouldn’t feel like inflation is still a problem.”

Who you gonna believe: Your cash register receipts or a feeble, corrupt, multi-​millionaire lifelong politician?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment folly

Crime Fighters Give Up

Canada, Toronto, police, crime, prevention

Fight crime — give criminals all your stuff today!

This isn’t my view. But it’s the apparent view of some — I hope not many — Canadian police officers.

At a recent public meeting about coping with crime, a Toronto police officer told people that to reduce the chances “of being attacked in your home, leave your [car key] fobs at your front door. Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

To reduce the risk to you personally, give up in advance.

Are you following the reasoning? Because I’m not. And I am very disinclined to leave my car keys and cash and my Taiwanese history library in a heap near the front door to buy off home invaders.

Instead, perhaps everybody in high-​risk neighborhoods should install a trap door in their vestibule, rigged in such a way that anybody who forcibly breaks into the home is immediately dropped into a vat of starving piranhas.

AIER’s John Miltimore sees an “obvious problem” with the policeman’s helpful advice. The problem is that he is asking people to encourage burglary and theft, to make it “easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.” If a lot of people follow the advice, this would tend to increase car thefts.

It all reminds Miltimore of the movie Robocop and its crime-​ridden landscape. “There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence.…”

To avoid dystopia, let’s defend ourselves instead.

And our cars. And car keys. And …

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

public school, home schooling, radicalize children, nanny state, education

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-​choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-​choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-​choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-​school-​choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
folly political challengers

Pied Pipers, Again

Adam Schiff

In 2015, the Hillary Clinton campaign exhibited the hubris for which politicians have been associated since the dawn of civilization. 

Instead of relying on a strategy of promoting Hillary herself, Clinton insiders plied what they called “Pied Piper candidates,” Republican hopefuls who, they theorized, would shift mainstream candidates further “right,” thus making the ultimate winners unpalatable to enough general election voters to win Hillary the election. There were three they identified: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. 

We know how this worked out.

In California, Democrats are returning to hubristic form.

The serpentine Adam Schiff, who is running to fill the slot formerly occupied by Senator Diane Feinstein, has directed $11 million in the primary “to elevate a GOP candidate,” according to The Washington Post. 

“The ads argue that Republican Steve Garvey — a congenial former pro baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres who voted twice for Donald Trump but won’t say if he will do so again — is too conservative for California and highlight his recent surge, in an apparent effort to consolidate support for him on the right.”

The idea is to boost Garvey with Republican primary voters in hopes that Garvey takes the second of two spots available for the November election under California’s Top Two system, becauseSchiff’s people think Garveyis easier to defeat than liberal Democrat “Rep. Katie Porter, whom Schiff and his backers would prefer to avoid facing come November in this left-​leaning state.”

But can this strategy really work in California? The ads portray Garvey as more Trumpian than he probably is, and recent polling suggests that Schiff and Garvey are now neck-and-neck.

A review of the Clinton metaphor, “Pied Piper,” shows how slippery the strategy can be. The “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is a cautionary tale. 

The Democrats’support may go the way of rats and children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts