One may ride upon a tiger’s back but it is fatal to dismount.
Categories
Categories
Truly “Green” Energy
“The remarkable thing about fossil fuels,” says science writer Matt Ridley, “is that when we use them, no other animal is deprived of its livelihood.”
In a fascinating talk, Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist and other brilliant, eye-opening books, calls our attention to what really should be an obvious fact: “No other animal [than us Homo sapiens sapiens] wants to eat coal, or oil, or gas.” But, he insists, when we fell a tree for our fuel, “we deprive a woodpecker of its life.”
This helps explain why, in so much of the world, animal species are coming back, their populations growing. They are renewing because of our use of non-renewable energy. (Renewable energy, he says, is quite bad for the ecosystem.)
But that’s just one reason burning fossil fuels is a good thing. Another is increased carbon dioxide (CO2).
“What?!?!” — I can hear the enviro-shrieks from here in my bunker. This weekend there were protests around the world about climate change.
But climate change may be a good thing.
Well, at least, the planet is getting greener. The Sahara’s getting greener. Much of the world’s landmasses are re-foresting — that’s even happening in Bangladesh.
I read about widespread reforestation in The Atlantic years ago. I’ve written about this and other greening before. But the reason isn’t simply because our fossil fuel reliance has made agriculture more efficient, thus requiring less land — that disused land can then grow wild, or cultivate non-agribiz plantlife. It’s also because CO2 feeds plants.
The Amazon, Ridley says, is greener than it was mere years ago.
Could later industrial civilization be saving the planet from the depredations of earlier industrial civilization?
Yes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Yves Guyot
Wages will always be in proportion to the productive capacity of the worker, and not in proportion to his needs.
Categories
Townhall: Kicking the Can Down Crony Lane
Over at Townhall, the case for getting rid of big business’s favorite sugar daddy. Click on over, then back here for more reading.
- USA Today: Shut down costly slush fund
- Club for Growth: The Top 10 Clients of the Export-Import Bank
- Heritage: Mismanagement of Export-Import Bank Invites Fraud
- Washington Examiner: Export-Import Bank costs taxpayers $2 billion a decade
- Club for Growth: Key Vote FY15 Continuing Resolution (H.J.Res. 124)
- Club for Growth: Elizabeth Warren and the Export-Import Bank
Categories
Video: NASA contracts with SpaceX etc
Rundown of the week’s big stories, including the new space deal.
This is surely not full privatization, but it is better than NASA monopolizing the space effort.
Plus: Peter Thiel on good and bad monopolies.
We’re naturally worried about the potential for police abuse of power — cops who roust people for no good reason, then claim that the other party was “resisting arrest” or some such thing.
But sometimes it’s the person on the other side of the badge who reconstructs history.
Several days ago, a story broke about Django Unchained actress Danièle Watts, who is African-American, being accosted along with her white boyfriend by a police officer who wanted to see their IDs. Both later suggested that they were targeted by police for racial reasons. On her Facebook page, Watts reported that she “was handcuffed and detained by two police officers . . . after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place.”
But audio of the encounter that has come to light shows an officer politely asking for ID, and explaining that he was responding to a call. (The caller had claimed the couple were having sex in public.) The officer is calm; Watts is persistently histrionic. She brings up race; he says race wasn’t the issue, sexual activity in public was.
We can argue about whether the officer should have handcuffed the actress in response to her recalcitrance. (Apparently, an accusation is all that is required to trigger police power, a demand to “see our papers.” It’s hard not to be on Ms. Watts’s pro-freedom side on that.) But now that this recording is out there, her original version of the encounter just won’t stand.
Enough reason to put video-recording devices onto every police lapel . . . in L.A., in Ferguson, everywhere.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Admiral William Halsey, Jr.
There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.
Categories
For Some Reason
Yesterday, the House voted to extend the legal ability for the Export-Import Bank to run . . . for another nine months. The people’s legislature passed the “stop-gap” measure, 319-108, with both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.
Just last month, President Obama expressed dismay that Republicans would be against it.
“For some reason,” he intoned, “right now the House Republicans have decided that we shouldn’t do this. . . .” He pretended to incredulity and puzzlement. He gave the usual reasoning for the subsidized financial guarantees, and insisted that “every country does this.”
“When,” he asked, “did that become something that Republicans opposed?”
Obama could’ve asked all those members of his own party who opposed it.
But then, he could have asked himself. Back in 2008, he very clearly put the Ex-Im Bank on the theoretical chopping block. Candidate Obama gave the big business bank up as a program that “didn’t work” and one that had become “little more than a fund for corporate welfare.”
So why the change of mind, Mr. Obama?
Has the Ex-Im ceased being a fund for corporate welfare?
No. It’s still there, propping up big businesses doing business abroad — indeed, multinationals abroad, the kind of companies that Obama’s Occupier friends despise so deeply.
What has changed? He’s in power, now. And that power derives from the mighty federal purse, filled by taxing hundreds of millions of Americans, and used to give hundreds of millions and billions in benefits to the few, the insiders.
President Obama and the congressional leadership of both parties are tighter than ever with special interests.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Harriet Tubman
I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.
Categories
Sweat the Small Stuff
Like most Americans, I pride myself on being able to detect irony at seven paces. Skimming through the news, I can certainly detect sarcasm (which is to irony what a cannon is to sidearms), as in this first paragraph from Reason magazine’s online pages:
Los Angeles City Council today approved a new citation system. . . . This new system allows the Los Angeles Police Department to cite residents for a whole host of minor crimes that used to result in warnings (and potentially misdemeanor charges if police felt like pressing the matter). Now it’s a way for the city to extract more money from residents for minor issues, and I’m sure that won’t be abused at all.
The point that Scott Shackford is making: the new system will be abused. When he tells us that “the city predicts it’s going to take in $1.59 million in revenue a year,” we see the reason for predictable abuse: money as well as power.
Mr. Shackford worries about the effects, about the people who will be caught in this net for all sorts of small little infractions of laws that they probably don’t even know exist. He wonders, he says, “if I should warn my neighbors, several of whom have friendly dogs they take outside to walk without leashes. It’s rarely a problem and I don’t hear complaints (except for this one little dog with a Napoleonic complex. There’s always one).”
My big worry? These sorts of laws (like: don’t put signage up on telephone poles, though “everybody is doing it”) hit the poor the hardest. The fines, starting at $250 a pop, are not insignificant.
A few of those and you might as well call yourself a member of a persecuted class.
Welcome, friend. The modern state seems bent on making us all members of that class.
No irony, here; just Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.