Category: folly

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folly ideological culture

Bill Gates Wants to Bury Trees

forestry, fires, global warming, climate change, Bill Gates

The latest plan from one of the world’s most annoying billionaires is to cut down trees and bury them.

It’s part of the “thinning” controversy.

The subject? Forest management. 

In the old days, human beings cleared forests or kept forests and harvested from them (for firewood, fungi, and fauna) on an ongoing basis. And, periodically, nature would swing around and forests would burn — a story as old as the hills, forest fires being part of the natural cycle. 

But when humans use forests for all sorts of things, but most especially harvesting building material (lumber), we have to take some control of the natural cycles. Forest thinning — cutting and removing some trees and leaving the rest — is a key silvicultural practice.

Some environmentalists have objected to this practice on the grounds that Nature Is Good and Sacred, with silviculturalists generally arguing that without thinning, forests become tinder-boxes, ripe for runaway fires in which forests are destroyed, value is lost, and people die.

A recent article in The Epoch Times covers some of this. I am not qualified to adjudicate the ecological disagreements. But Bill Gates pushing the thinning of forests not as a means of harvesting lumber or as a means of reducing forest fires, but as a way of sequestering carbon, seems loopy: “Through his foundation Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mr. Gates is a part of the $6.6 million seed investor pool backing Kodama Systems in its proposal to remove trees in California’s fire-challenged woodlands and bury them in Nevada to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2).”

I would prefer sequestering that carbon in housing, which we need more of, not less.

But Gates has his eyes on atmospheric CO2 levels, not helping the poor in America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly national politics & policies

Don’t Fence Me In?

Joe Biden, border wall, immigration, NIMBY

“The Biden administration on Thursday said it would expand former President Donald Trump’s wall,” informs The Gray Lady, with a stiff upper lip. 

And do it lickety-split: “Biden criticized for waiving 26 laws in Texas to allow border wall construction,” the UK Guardian headlines its report. 

In fiscal 2023, government data shows 245,000 people entered the United States from this Rio Grande Valley sector.

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in the federal registry.

“Well, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall,” quipped the American Economic Liberties Project’s Matt Stoller, “Biden did.”

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” the president had promised to the contrary during the 2020 campaign. Now Sleepy Joe’s administration has so awakened to the need for action on immigration that it argues for fencing off the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act from getting in the way . . . 

. . . of building that wall. 

Fast!

The New York Times notes “intensifying” complaints coming from “Democratic leaders in New York, Chicago and elsewhere who say the influx is overwhelming their ability to house and feed the migrants.” 

Want a nimble response to the border crisis? 

Instead, we see a NIMBY response — from big-city politicians, as the buses arrive from down south.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly too much government

The California Experiment

safety first, California, socialism, globalism, global warming, climate change, control

California is determined to give us the full bleak picture of totalitarianism, American-style.

Anticipating proposed SEC regulations, Newsom’s California is set to impose nonsensical mandates for reporting greenhouse gas emissions and “climate-related financial risk” that target companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more (according to the terms of SB253) and $500 million or more (SB261).

Billion-dollar businesses will have to report all direct and indirect emissions, including emissions produced throughout a business’s supply chain. Business travel. Employee commutes. Penalties for failure to report could be as high as $500,000.

The cost is in time, money, privacy, freedom, with no benefits except to bureaucrats and politicians who enjoy bossing us around and destroying our ability to function.

These requirements are tyrannical in the same way they’d be tyrannical if required of you and me as individuals. 

Do you know all about the emissions produced in delivering the water, electricity, electronics, gas, paper you use each month? 

Care to drop everything you’re doing to find out? 

And submit the data in a bureaucrat-satisfying format?

We already know what the results of California’s experiment will be. We already know that crushing freedom and giving unfettered power to slave-masters is not the road to wealth and happiness.

What we don’t know is exactly how far the Tarnished State’s aspiring totalitarians will go. But whatever the consequences, they’ll blame others . . . or just mutter “Good riddance, we didn’t want that prosperity and those evil businesses anyway.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly too much government

Downshifting Before the Cliff

climate, global warming, energy, government

A scenario: You and millions of others are willy-nilly running toward a cliff.

You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.

But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.

“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”

Fiction? No.

The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to . . . pretend . . . to prepare.

It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035. 

Not 2030 as previously stated.

Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.

Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.

Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.

British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Will We Comply?

Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, covid, masks

“To every COVID tyrant who wants to take away our freedom, hear these words,” intoned Donald J. Trump, eleven days ago, “we will not comply.”

The former president did not stop there: “So don’t even think about it. We will not shut down our schools. We will not accept your lockdowns. We will not abide by your mask mandates. And we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.”

While Trump still boasts about his vaccine heroism, his supporters range from iffy to hostile on the subject. So Trump positions himself against mandates and for “freedom,” while in the past he was for masks and for lockdowns, as well as pushing the novel vaccines that cleverly (and perhaps dangerously) leveraged the spiked protein protuberances on SARS-CoV-2.

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Trump brought into the world conversation about the pandemic in 2020, is similarly trying to position himself with some trickiness and . . . care. 

Fauci foresees mask recommendations, but no mandates — but note that he focuses on what federal bureaucrats say and do, not on what governors in the states do under federal bureaucrats’ advisement. 

CNN’s Michael Smerconish interrogated Fauci about the many studies showing that masks are ineffective against respiratory diseases like COVID. 

Fauci’s reply? Against the big study cited here in February, Fauci mentioned “other studies,” lamely and unconvincingly. He admitted that, overall — as affecting the course of the pandemic — “the data” about mask efficacy have been “less strong.” But “on an individual basis of someone protecting themselves, or protecting themselves from spreading to others,” Fauci still insists “there’s no doubt that there are many studies” showing “an advantage.”

If you buy that, you’ll wear masks forever — or comply with anything.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly media and media people public opinion

Volcano Denialism

science, global warming, climate change, volcano, weather

Some weather we’ve been having, eh? Record-setting heat in many locales. 

It must be global warming!

Well, it is hotter than usual. 

But this is summer.

And a volcano did blow in the ocean near Tonga, a year and a half ago, and scientists at the time did say that the water vapor it placed into the stratosphere could linger for years, affecting the climate.

Still, you won’t see recognition of this factor for warming on the major news sources. They keep pushing the AGW line: anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming: “climate change.”

Matt Walsh, on his podcast, ran through the vulcanism story last week. Water vapor is a more effective, broad-spectrum greenhouse gas than CO2, which all the journos cannot help but push (because it fits a statist agenda, and that’s their real business: propaganda).

Walsh calls mainstream AGW crusaders “volcano denialists.”

Our planet’s ecosystem is ultra-complicated. Cloud cover (which has something to do with water vapor, you might say) can also cool the planet by increasing high-altitude albedo, a point touched upon in The Epoch Times, “Nobel Winner on Climate Agenda: ‘We Are Totally Awash in Pseudoscience,” which focuses on physicist John Clausner and his contrarian views on climate.

“Contra the IPCC and other major institutions,” Clausner contends “that climate is primarily set by . . . the ‘cloud cover thermostat,’ a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high and vice-versa.”

He was slated to give a talk to the International Monetary Fund on July 25, but that was cancelled. These elites have directed trillions of global dollars to “research” global climate, and Clausner’s caution that they’ve made “a trillion-dollar mistake” is not exactly welcome.

It’s not just vulcanism they deny. They deny water.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

climate, elites, warming, ecology

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious. 

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies? 

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special. 

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show. 

To set us up to suffer — for real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly ideological culture too much government

Apocalypse California

Gavin Newsom, California, reparations, racism

The Democratic Party is a victim of its own success. Nowhere can we see that more clearly than in California.

Democrats have succeeded by pushing “victimhood,” gaining power by focusing on special groups, declaring them oppressed and offering compensation — though still never comes the day of full escape from the burden of this oppression.

Many stories of oppression are true.But no sized sliver of truth can guarantee that compensation attempts will redound to the liberation of the aggrieved.

California’s Democrats will face this soon.

Over slavery! And racism.

Never a slave state, California has been flirting, officially, with reparations. Several cities have “explored” the idea. An official “Reparations Task Force,” established by state law, has recommended a formal apology for slavery (in other states, over a hundred-and-fifty years ago). It’s also talking about giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to Black Californians, descendants of slaves or not. 

The task force is scheduled to make explicit and detailed recommendations —  on July 1.

Which puts Democrats on the spot.

Powerful Democrats such as Governor Gavin Newsom. Considered a rising presidential aspirant should the current 82-year-old decide not to run again, Newsom signed the law to officially look at reparations . . . but then seemed less than fond of the price-tag. More than twice the yearly state budget!

Now the governor is keeping his mouth shut awaiting the final report.

And, as George Skelton at the L.A. Times asks, then what? Well, that is when “the governor and lawmakers will need to emerge from cover, face the public and devise a better response.”

But up until July they can still pretend.

Then, Democrats will have to face the reparations issue squarely — and in the context of the complete failure of their state, the blame for which they cannot place upon Republicans, much less long-dead racist slave-owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly national politics & policies

On the 1197th Day…

flatten the curve

Yesterday, the COVID crisis ended. Officially.

That is, on May 11, 2023, the “public health emergency” expired, following the termination of the “national emergency” over a month earlier.

Jordan Schachtel, writing at The Dossier on Substack, did the math and noted that this “marks an incredible 1196 Days To Slow The Spread.” 

“That’s right,” Mr. Schachtel elaborated. “Almost three and a half years of engaging in peak absurdity in the name of stopping [the] virus. And yet, the ‘experts’ don’t have a single thing to show for it.”

Remember why our leaders wanted to “slow” that “spread”: not to save lives over all. They admitted that the gross numbers of the affected couldn’t be affected by the half-a-month lockdown and mask mandates that Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump pushed. They argued merely that lockdowns might “flatten” the distribution of cases and personal crises over time to alleviate a bottleneck — crowding — for a brief, initial pandemic period in the nation’s hospitals.

That was it.

That was the rationale.

But after the 15 days were over, almost none of the emergency pandemic units set up by the military had been used to take hospital overflow.  Either (a) the 15 days had been enough, or (b) it had all been unnecessary. The answer is (b).

Everything else was just politics — the extended lockdowns, mask mandates, suppression of alternative treatments, the massive subsidies and vaccine mandates and passports and much else. What it sure seemed like? A vast jury-rigged scheme to get people to take the experimental “vaccines” then being rushed through the regulatory process.

Indeed, one thing was very clear from Day 16 onward: a “national” policy made no sense, for the pandemic hit regions of the country at different times and to different degrees. New York got hit hard in 2020, but the Pacific Northwest’s hospitals were mostly empty during the pandemic — causing a very different “beds” stressor. 

Yet our politicians pushed a national policy of emergencies that lasted, at the very least, 1181 days too long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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