In which Michael Moore proves his ignorance to be abysmal
I never considered Michael Moore to be a mental giant. But I always thought he was a basically intelligent person, and certainly one who’s smart about manipulating facts to make effective propaganda films.
But he seems until recently to have been ignorant of the most basic – and I mean basic – scientific principles, by his own admission:
Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, “but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?”
“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.
Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me but – WTF?
I’m no engineer nor am I a physicist. But I did take high school physics. And although I have forgotten far more than I remember of that course, it doesn’t even take high school science to understand certain facts about energy that, if memory serves, were well-learned by 6th or at the latest 7th grade.
Rather simply put, energy has to come from somewhere. It isn’t magic. Does Moore not have any curiosity whatsoever? Could he, like, maybe do a search for the answer to a question for which he doesn’t have an answer? But to do that, a person has to be asking the question. A person has to “really think about where is the electricity coming from.” Or maybe just think about it at all.
As I already said, I’m no scientist. But even seven years ago, when I wrote this post, I had encountered what we might call the Michael Moore theory of electric cars. Here’s what I wrote back then:
I am convinced that a certain not-insignificant percentage of people believe that electric cars don’t have any environmental effects at all — that they run on magic or they run on air, and that electricity comes out of the wall socket in some mystical process that doesn’t need to be considered in the equation.
Yes, indeedy.
A day or two ago I was talking to a friend about COVID and when on earth we might be allowed to resume semi-normal lives. She mentioned that some official (I wish I could remember who it was) mentioned that from now on – meaning, indefinitely – airplanes would need to have six feet between passengers. I chuckled and asked how long the person thought airlines could remain economically viable if that continued. After all, it takes a lot of money (and energy) to fly a plane. She seemed startled by the question and had no answer. But it was clear to me that the issue had never even occurred to her. And she’s ordinarily a very intelligent person.
[NOTE: I used to really like reading the blogger Steven den Beste, back when I first discovered blogs. He gave up blogging long ago, and died a few years ago, but some of his work is still online. He dealt with the problem of energy production/conversion/usage in many of his posts. Here’s one I found just now, written in 2002. I don’t have time to reread it at the moment to check it out, but I recall being impressed by a lot of his work back when I first read it.]
Again, committed gentry liberals have political views that derive from their personal self-concept interacting with others of their tribe. Nowadays, it’s all reducible to a mixture of social anxiety, animosity, and conceit. Moore has plenty of animosity and conceit.
Q: Where does electricity come from?
A: Wall outlets.
A person has to “really think about where is the electricity coming from.”
Oh, but Moore knows that: electricity and solar panels come from the good guys, while oil comes from the evil capitalists.
Something which has plagued American politics since the end of the Cold War has been a completely irrational belief that there is essentially a fairy godmother watching over the United States and that no matter what we do, everything will always be just fine. Therefore, there was actually no need to concern oneself with this little thing called “reality.”
This used to be something equally present on both sides of the political divide but the right-wing economic populism unleashed by Trump is proof the Conservative side of American politics is shaking off that delusion.
Mike
AOC has the same attitude. A couple of months ago, she gushed about mining being halted by the courts as a fight against emissions. The mining in question was for minerals used in magnets, the same magnets used in windmills to generate electricity.
Without the mining in the US, the minerals would have to be dug up from Russia, China or Africa. Places where the environment and labor rules are lax or non-existent. Child and prison labor are rampant and deaths from dust and collapse are daily hazards.
These people (AOC and others) can sit back to deny our mining or drilling while using those same items from other places without considering those affected there. If the items are mined here, environmental and labor regulations are generally followed to protect the land and workers.
Because they really know nothing but their “feelings” about things. Not the reality or economics of the situations.
You still need oil to make the electric cars. Where do they think plastics come from, or tires? The stupidity of the “Green New Deal” is amazing and yet people buy into it. Do they not know that materials in the wonderful solar panel come from China? Do they not know that the turbine blades for the wonderful wind turbines can’t be recycled and do need to be replaced. Do they not know that the materials in the batteries need to be mined?
We pause this thread to point out where we aren’t looking when we decide to care about fat American hating communist who makes huge money (like willi munzenberg did), screwing with the heads of his own people
As i pointed out.. (for years where we are heading given all the different weakness introduced into the western milieu)…
Military ships are now heading into the china sea
Orders given to return fire to Iranian harassment
Venezuela is in this too…
Trump tweets order to ‘destroy’ Iranian boats. Pentagon calls it a warning.
U.S. Warships Enter Disputed Waters of South China Sea as Tensions With China Escalate
Indonesia mobilises fisherman for stand-off with Chinese vessels
China ‘ready to go to war’ if Taiwan tries to gain independence, major defence ministry report says
Navy helicopter pilots hit by lasers in South China Sea
Good thing women can be drafted now…
they sure going to regret wanting to be more like men (they did not appreciate)
and men will be less wanting to fight, like women (they would have died for).
NY TIMES: Women Should Have to Register for Military Draft, Too, Commission Tells Congress
USA Today: Q&A: A judge has ruled the male-only military draft unconstitutional. What happens now?
Gonna be a hot time in the igloo…
We now return to discussing a useless overweight dreg of society…
In fairness to Michael Moore, isn’t he just saying that he thought solar panels had a very long lifespan?
That’s not an unreasonable belief. I wouldn’t scoff at someone who thought that solar panels lasted for a 100 years instead of 25.
First Law Thermodynamics version:
“Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only transported”
In other words, the sum total of energy in the universe is effectively constant. And to re-cycle a used energy source, and equal amount of energy must be replaced in whatever form it was used.
So batteries are re-charged by using electricity generated by burning – say – coal. And to make fuel from CO2 burned into the atmosphere, an equal amount of energy must be gotten from transfer from another source.
There ain’t no Free Lunch…
And lead us not into a discussion of Entropy and its effects on the energy situation.
Amen, Brothers and Sisters…
RohanV:
No, he’s saying he didn’t know what went into making them as well.
He is also saying he hadn’t a clue how electricity is generated and lacked one iota of curiosity about it, although apparently that didn’t stop him from publicly opining on the subject of electric cars.
Steven den Beste? Neo, now I know I want to marry you! 😉 He was the best and one of the early bloggers I read too. I learned so much from his blog. It was so sad when he stopped writing, and ever sadder, when he died. Stay safe!
He is also saying he hadn’t a clue how electricity is generated and lacked one iota of curiosity about it, although apparently that didn’t stop him from publicly opining on the subject of electric cars.
He’s spent his entire life self-employed bar a modest period working for Mother Jones. His supervisors there when queried did something exceedingly unusual: they stated explicitly that he’d been fired and that they’d done so because his character and personality defects made him impossible to work with.
He doesn’t know anything about anything but producing agitprop which provides emotional validation to a certain sort of bourgeois. It’s a repulsive way of making a living, but it pays the bills very well.
Even referencing the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics would probably elicit a blank stare from Moore. Just like it did from 90% of the faculty on the college’s environmental committee when I was a member.
Nuclear Energy from the technology we now have comes closer to getting a clean good source of electrical energy but no, those who know deemed that to be evil a long time ago. And yes, there are many people who take all of the infrastructure and wonderful lifestyle conveniences for granted. No questions in their collective, proper thinking, minds about the energy and resources plus labor the built our roads, cities, water supplies and power grids.
Everyone knows electricity comes out of a wall socket and water comes out of a faucet, hot on the left, cold on the right. Hot and cold air in the house are made by that little plastic thing on the wall when you change the numbers and it goes on and on. The best grades in school are made by students who know how to answer questions with the pre-programmed answers that align with the views of the teachers, points will be taken away for questioning the questions or making waves by stating the obvious when it does not align with the assumed correct political views and alway assume, unless told otherwise, that the teacher is a Democrat.
“I assumed solar panels would last for ever.”
Ten or 15 years ago I tried to figure out the longevity of solar panels via internet searches. I gave up after dozens of searches. It seems no one wanted to talk about it.
Around that time, an engineer that installed the panels told me that the half power life of a solar panel is about 15 to 20 years. Not that great IMHO.
As I understand it, there are three major types, single crystal semiconductor (e.g. Sunpower corp.), polycrystalline semiconductor, and thin film (First Solar corp.).
Here is a link to a First Solar product that says that the panel will have 86% of full power after 25 years. (Bottom of page 1) That’s pretty good. The thin film panels are less efficient so you need to cover more area, but they cost less and last longer.
My wife recently had a conversation with a relative that is reflexively liberal. Since she didn’t want to poison an important relationship my wife diverted the conversation before it became too heated. But she came away with the strong impression that said relative believes that “electric” cars are different from battery powered cars.
it doesn’t even take high school science to understand certain facts about energy that, if memory serves, were well-learned by 6th or at the latest 7th grade.
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” ~ C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man
yeah.. but we fixed the schools to favor women so they would rule the world and the men who liked tech would be equalized… duh… what do you think those names i put up were talking about?
Businesses are currently looking for bachelors degrees for jobs in the past that required an associates… we drugged the boys, put all the help in girls till the mail suicide rate is huge… and that our enlistments went from 75% capable to 25% capable, and that’s with accepting druggies and tattoos, and so on and so forth.
the women fomented more and more socialism is good… as they certainly were not capitalists… hey fomented high taxes and stagnation, wanting tax money to fund what they lost in relationships creating impoverished single mother homes… and funding abortion… (and from AOC position to fund lots of other things too)..
Where were we in education in 1968?
where are we now?
US economic development has stalled. We’ve recently learned that only about half of people born around 1980 earn more today than their parents did at a similar age. The nation’s deteriorating education sector is one important factor, culpable for both weak economic growth and rising income inequality.
College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times higher in 2015 than in 1980
because we nationalized education loans so that they could decide who got to go and who didn’t… a lot more women are saddled with those loans and dont work their careers as long as men… They ALSO decided to take tons of feel good courses that made them militant and not courses that made them a boon to be hired to pay the loans off…
of course these people dont know science.. they dont know how things work and all that… they are more like the ladies of pre 1968 than everyone became like the men of the space age!!!!
people been screaming about the decline and the outcome of what that would eventually invite (war) for 30 years… now we are here.. making policy on such stupidity… fomenting self hatred… suicide… legal drug use as Aldous Huxley painted…
The men America left behind – American Psychological
The Ongoing Decline of the American Male
The Side Effects of the Decline of Men
The decline of men
The Collegiate War Against Men – Forbes
The Decline of Men Without Degrees in the Labor Market …
Why American Men Are Getting Less Marriageable
The decline in sex is a symptom of male joblessness
Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College?
but the big change is that men supported women and familys..
women do not support men (they hate), they kick men out that dont earn
Ergo ipso facto: 1 out of every three children have no father…
Socialism and Feminism: We Can’t Have One Without the Other
Fighting capitalism and patriarchy at the same time.
Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement
Socialism Was Once America’s Political Taboo. Now, Democratic Socialism Is a Viable Platform.
(i guess the ladies didnt learn that Dem Socialism was Lenins party, or did they and desire it?)
Why Capitalism and Feminism Can’t Coexist – By Nicole M. Aschoff
55% Of Women Prefer Socialism To Capitalism. Here’s Why They’re Wrong. [the federalist]
Why Socialist Feminism?
Radical Women – socialist feminism in action!
Sexual Equality & Socialism | Dissent Magazine
Barbara Ehrenreich. What is Socialist Feminism? 1976
You are a woman in a capitalist society. You get pissed off: about the job, about the bills, about your husband (or ex), about the kids’ school, the housework, being pretty, not being pretty, being looked at, not being look at (and either way, not listened to), etc. If you think about all these things and how they fit together and what has to be changed, and then you look around for some words to hold all these thoughts together in abbreviated form, you’d almost have to come up with “socialist feminism.”
Because only a dictatorship can change all that from how we act when we are free..
55% Of Women Prefer Socialism To Capitalism. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/10/women-prefer-socialism-to-capitalism/
Michael Moore’s in a feminist mood in ‘Where to Invade Next’
Michael Moore Tries To Prove Women Are Better Than Men …
Trump Is Not the Only Grabber Who Must Go – Michael Moore
Michael Moore slams GOP hypocrisy on women’s rights
Michael Moore: Women That Voted For Trump “Victims” Of Ingrained “Misogyny And Sexism”
As another example of the lefty disinclination to let numbers and the like enter into the discussion, consider this discussion on Cuban agriculture.Urban farming as a response to climate-driven food crises: Cuba shows the way.
The article does correctly point out that Cuba has had a fairly successful program to grow vegetables on urban plots. Its other conclusions are either debatable, and in a number of instances, fact-free.
The problem here is that Cuba’s food supply issue since 1990 is not merely cutoff of imports but largely a collapse in domestic production. My comment:
Again, most of this fall occurred after 1990. Perhaps I should have pointed that out in my comment.
The person I believe is the blogmeister replied:
The problem with touting Cuba’s ranking in the “Sustainable Development Index” is that most of Cuba’s food is imported- thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union. How much of Cuba’s food supply is imported is up to debate, but one source claims 70-80%.
World Food Programme: Cuba:70 to 80% of food requirements are imported
Which makes the Sustainability claim absurd, as energy using data for Cuban food imports is not included.
Comments got cut off. I am reminded of William F. Buckley’s remark that liberals tell us they want to have other points of view to be considered, and then are surprised to find out there are other points of view.Granted this guy is not a liberal, but a far-out lefty.
“But to do that, a person has to be asking the question.”
Liberalism is not about asking questions. It’s about “knowing” answers, the knowledge acquired through some undefined mystical process. I think their “voices” tell them.
Moore is not intelligent but he does have what some call ‘low cunning.’
Its why he excels at agitprop. And why he called it correctly, when he called the 2016 election for Trump much earlier than most. Even before many on the right knew Hillary was going to lose, Moore knew.
Cunning. He knows what way the wind blows and he knows when it shifts.He just has no idea why the wind blows or what makes it happen.
Photovoltaic panel efficiency decreases with age. Typical silicon photo cells have an efficiency of around 15 percent. After you install them and start using them, it decreases. On the average, solar panel output falls by 0.8 percent a year. Wind turbines don’t have a very long lifetime either, much less than their advertised lifespan.
The”green new deal” is a mass hallucination.
Michael Moore has ALWAYS been a moron, but these admissions MAY indicate that he has started to obtain his first CLUE about how the world works.
I don’t have any real hope that he will receive the next clue until after the heat death of the universe.
“In fairness to Michael Moore…”??!!
When did he ever extend one iota of “fairness” to the victims that came under his scrutiny? Did he ever give them a chance to defend themselves? No! All that was important to Michael Moore was making people squirm for the amusement of his ignorant audience.
Sorry… In my mind, he has been judged guilty and deserves no mercy. His ignorance is no excuse. Let him rot in hell!
Solar panels also cause considerable environmental damage to use. A typical fossil fuel or nuclear power plant produces 1 kiloWatt of power per square meter, 24/7 regardless of the weather, the equivalent of lighting ten 100 W light bulbs continuously. A solar panel, taking into account the weakness of sunlight as a power source, the inefficiency of the panel, night time, and overcast will only produce about 50 Watt per square meter, the equivalent of a 50 Watt bulb. Consequently you need to cover twenty times the area of a regular power plant to produce the same amount of electricity. Bye, bye forests. There used to be sections of the Mass pike with large swathes of colorful wild flowers. They’ve been replaced with ugly black solar panels, to save the environment.
Steven den Beste was one of the greats of the early blogosphere. I was very sorry when he retired from almost all blogging because, as he explained it, he was worn out from trying to educate people who really wanted to believe that was such a thing as a free lunch, that a perpetual motion machine could be built and other ever popular fallacies.
I just watched ‘Planet of the Humans’ on YouTube last night. Micheal Moore is the executive producer. It is ‘eye opening’ about what really goes on and what is behind ‘green alternatives’ for energy. I highly recommend this documentary and forward it to your friends that are passionate about the new green deal. It is free and was released on Earth Day. It is well done and comes from the perspective from an old fashion environmentalist. Here is the link;
https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE
I don’t think these people are necessarily incurious.
I think they are a mono-culture intellectually. Not only do they not ask fairly obvious questions, no one they know has asked those questions. It’s a closed circle.
“electricity comes out of the wall socket”
“food comes from the grocery store”
I live in Silicon Valley and I know pretty much countless people who consider themselves well-informed, indeed EXTREMELY well-informed. They get their news from WaPo, NYT, BBC, NBC, The Atlantic, PBS, NPR, The Economist and so on. They have no idea how much is being filtered out due to “Teh Agenda”.
To repeat myself, they are not incurious. They read a lot. They know numbers of facts. They are intelligent.
But they are in a closed circle.
They have a world view that covers everything. Unfortunately, the limitations mean their world view is cracking just as though they believed in Flat Earth or Earth at the Center of the Universe.
Things keep popping up that they didn’t expect and can’t explain. BrExit passes. Trump is nominated. Trump gets elected. The US economy doesn’t collapse, in fact it ignites. World War 3 doesn’t start. Red states don’t suffer from WuFlu more than Blue states.
I’m sure Instapundit would diagnose it as: “They’re not a pack, they’re a herd”
Skippo, electric cars *are* different from battery-powered cars. Electric cars use very very very long cords.
JimNorCal:
I disagree.
It is one thing to be uninformed about the other side of politics because you read biased sources, and don’t even realize it. It is quite another to know that you have not a clue how it is that electricity comes out of a socket or a battery and not have an iota of curiosity about it, and yet opine on power in all its intricacies.
That’s being incurious.
I think most Progs are slightly more clueful that MM; they know electricity has to come from *somewhere*. But they have convinced themselves that solar/wind could be the universal source if Bad People weren’t suppressing it for a Profit.
In this they are aided and abetted by analyses done by respectable companies purporting to show that solar/wind are now as cheap on a KWH basis as new coal plants. The problem with these analyses is that they don’t consider the fact that a KWH generated at 1:00 PM when it is sunny and and KWH needed at 7:00 PM when it is not, are not the same thing…still less the KWHs needed after it’s been snowing and the winds have been still for several days.
Most ordinary commodities can be stored pretty well and reasonably cheaply: most people do not grasp (and are being encouraged not to grasp) just how different electricity is from this POV.
“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, …”
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about this subject. From my previous comment, if one is not terribly space constrained, the thin film solar panels are the clear winning choice since their longevity is excellent. But, they are made from the materials Cadmium and Tellurium among others. Cadmium is a toxic heavy metal, that was once used to plate steel screws and bolts. Not so much any more.
So don’t eat or chew on the discarded thin film solar panels, or toss them into a landfill that leaches into the aquifer. But I believe that many greenies lose all sense of reason when they learn that there are toxic things inside these magic devices.
I have been referring to electric cars as “coal powered cars”, much to the irritation of many, including those I am related to. I often ask if they know what the solar panels are made of. They have no idea how many acres of solar panels it will take to run a carbon arc furnace to produce steel.
Here in the red edge of CA we see large tracts of grazing land taken to cover with solar panels. What will the cows eat? Some say “hay” but the idea that hay is grown on land, land that is being put to use as solar panel habitat. These people are brain dead.
If you want to know how long a solar panel lasts take a look at the length of the “guarantee” offered by those selling the things. Not a lot of research needed.
I would be willing to bet that kids who are home schooled know more about the “where it comes from” than those who attend government schools.
Don’t solar panels grow in solar panel farms, just like windmill farms?
Another Mike…”They have no idea how many acres of solar panels it will take to run a carbon arc furnace to produce steel.”
Something they could maybe related to better: How many acres of solar panels will it take to run a high-speed train? And how many to run a whole railroad’s worth of high-speed trains, as in France?
Losing Steven den Beste, first to his retirement and then to his premature death was horrible. When he died, I knew him from the early blogosphere, but my kid knew him from his anime reviews. Very sad his voice is gone.
Michael Moore must feel like God has it in for him — fat people are more likely to die when infected with Covid-19 and there are lots of symptom-free thin people spreading it around. He can’t be a happy camper.
Well, neo, I disagree right back!
But I hope without being disagreeable 🙂 🙂
Hey, I’m conservative and willing to listen to something that doesn’t support the Green Agenda. But I still recall seeing a piece on Instapundit years ago where it was posited that open-pit mining of Canadian ore, shipping it to Japan, processing it to manufacture a battery and shipping the car back to the US to sell it meant that Prius’s were equivalent to ordinary cars in terms of being green (if not worse, when you count the environmental cost to later dispose of the battery).
I was predisposed to being open to the argument but I never thought of it myself.
Similarly, I still remember seeing the meme: “If you drive an EV in Kentucky, you’re driving a coal-powered car” because that’s where your electricity is coming from. Totes obvious, once pointed out. But I didn’t think of it on my own and didn’t go searching for it. It just turned up in my path … because my path was wider than CNN, et al.
My introduction to MM was his Introduction to the book “Rivethead”, written by a long-time GM Truck & Bus assembly line worker. I strongly recommend that book.
It was published roughly around the time MM did “Roger and Me” about his “efforts” to interview Roger Smith of GM. My opinion of MM declined monotonically since then.
SdB, man, one of my very favorite bloggers from back then. Heartbreaking when he got ill and tired, and then…
So Harry Potter is not real? I am devastated.
Paul in Boston: A typical fossil fuel or nuclear power plant produces 1 kiloWatt of power per square meter, 24/7 regardless of the weather, the equivalent of lighting ten 100 W light bulbs continuously.
hell no… they produce orders of magnitude more, and nuclear even more…
W. A. Parish is one of the largest coal and natural gas power plants in the US and occupies a 4,664-acre site.. now that is the total property, the area that does the power generation is smaller… but lets go with that… 3,653 MW is its installed capacity.. that’s 783,233 watts per acre… or 783 kilowatts per acre..
Palo Verde nuclear plant.. is on 4,000 acres… (these two plants sit on a lot more land than they use.. most nuclear plants are on much smaller plots).. its average production (not installed capacity), is about 3.3 gigawatts (GW).. thats about 825,000 watts per acre..
I live within walking distance of Ravenswood in Queens ny… (long walk)
but at one time, i lived across the river from Indian point.. you could hold a fluorescent bulb out my window and it would light… though not inside..
Indian points The plant generates over 2,000 megawatts (2 GW)… and its plot of land is a heck of a lot smaller than Texas and Arizona use.. here is a photo of its two units… it warms the Hudson river a few degrees as the water goes by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center#/media/File:Indian_Point_Nuclear_Power_Plant.jpg
for contrast.. The largest currently operating solar farm in the U.S. is the 579-MW Solar Star installation in California… using 1.7 million solar panels, made by SunPower and spread over 13 square kilometers (3,200 acres)…
you can look at them all on satellite google maps..
W. A. Parish.. most of the area is used storing coal
Solar Star is humongous when you compare it to buildings and cars
Palo verde is not that large either, the other areas of land have solar and so on
and Indian point is tiny…
nuclear power gives the best bang for the buck..
and newer designs are much safer..
including mini nuke plants made by companies like Westinghouse or GE..
Westinghouse SMR (Small Modular Reactor) 225 MWe integral pressurized water reactor with all primary components located inside the reactor vessel. on 15 acres..
here is a list of them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_designs
the largest is in Indonesia.. TMSR-500… “Thorium Molten Salt Reactor”
There are also hydrogen powered cars, and they use hydrogen as backup power for solar cells… they are quite cool and there are stations all over the country people are not aware of… they make the hydrogen usually by steam process with natural gas as the source…
So according to my betters, although you are not my betters, 90+% of electrical power comes from dea Hydro-Carborn sources. Okay green new deal. What clueless idiots.
I got into an argument with someone about “renewable” energy some time ago, and went to prove that solar could never even come close to our energy needs. I showed the math and everything.
They replied with “but solar panels just keep getting more efficient”.
I then pointed out that the absolute maximum laws-of-physics limit for solar panel efficiency was 33.7% and we were already at 25%, so there wasn’t that much room to improve and it was unlikely we could ever get very close to that limit in practice (I linked to the Wikipedia article on the Shockley–Queisser limit and everything), and they just flat refused to believe me and kept repeating that “solar panels will keep on getting better.”
Innumeracy abounds.
Also, people have no idea how many orders of magnitude there are between “human” scale and “planet” scale.
I tried to demonstrate to someone lately complaining about Trump’s executive order about mining the Moon, that we could mine 10 million tons a year from the Moon for 10 thousand years and it wouldn’t come close to “affecting the tides here on Earth.”
I’m pretty sure this refusal to understand scale is what drives irrational CAGW fears.
Paul in Boston on April 22, 2020 at 7:24 pm said:
…There used to be sections of the Mass pike with large swathes of colorful wild flowers. They’ve been replaced with ugly black solar panels, to save the environment.
* * *
“They paved paradise, put up a solar lot.”
(Doo-doo-doo)
“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone…”
John F. MacMichael on April 22, 2020 at 7:28 pm said:
Steven den Beste was one of the greats of the early blogosphere. I was very sorry when he retired from almost all blogging because, as he explained it, he was worn out from trying to educate people who really wanted to believe that was such a thing as a free lunch, that a perpetual motion machine could be built and other ever popular fallacies.
* * *
Steven really was the best. I found his work only recently, and didn’t have as much time to appreciate it as Neo and others, but he was clearly one of the top thinkers and writers on the Webz.
I’m not surprised he got tired of the treadmill; Thomas Sowell retired for much the same reason, if I am not mistaken.
As for the fallacy loving public, there is a reason P. T. Barnum got rich.
“Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the
tastegullibility of the American public.”“There’s a
suckerprogressive born every minute.”Well, actually, Barnum probably didn’t originate that last one, although he gets most of the credit for it, but I’m sure he used it as a psychological model in creating his shows.
He did say quite a few other things, and this one seems appropriate to the current times. He might even have been speaking of Moore’s psychological progenitors.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/201036.P_T_Barnum
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/11/fool-born/
“you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone…”
I hope what we’ve lost to the WuFlu is not permanently lost. I noticed a link at Insty to American Digest which in turn linked to TheZMan blog. Some evocative poetry going on there ….
” this event has revealed the provincialism of the typical city dweller. It is fair to say that if the hot spot for the virus had been Appalachia, it would barely rate a segment on the cable chat shows. Because the center was New York City, the home of the media centers, it is the only thing worth discussing. The most provincial people on earth live in New York City and media people are some of the dumbest, making for the perfect storm.
For example, the people protesting the crackdown are people with a real stake in society, as in a job and bills to pay. They are not motivated by esoteric debates about political philosophy. They don’t have a walk-in closet full of moral signifiers they use to display their membership in narrow identity groups. They just try to live their lives the best they can under the conditions set for them. The conditions are becoming untenable now, so they are making as much noise as they can about it.
The typical cosmopolitan looks at these protests and just assumes the people doing them are ignorant and confused. “Don’t they know how dangerous it is out there?” the cosmopolitans incredulously demand. The fact is, the protesters know exactly how dangerous it is out there – not very dangerous at all – and they are willing to bet on their own judgement about it.”
Dang, I am seeing EXACTLY this in my local NextDoor posts. All the folk putting teddy bears in the window and writing in chalk on the sidewalk to bolster themselves … fiery denunciations of people jogging past with sweat and heavy breathing as they take their daily walk. These people tell themselves they are in a war zone. Those joggers are shedding virus by the gazillion. And these people say they are supporting the “front line troops” in the hospital. Actually, the danger they are in … is increasingly known to be minimal.
Archive of Steven den Beste at Chicago Boyz.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/author/steven-den-beste
Couple of posts that have stood the test of time. (The wierd formatting comes from the cut-and-paste, and I’m not taking the time to fix it.)
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4475.html
The Unreality-based Community
Posted by Steven Den Beste on October 8th, 2006
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4531.html#more-4531
A difference in kind
Posted by Steven Den Beste on November 1st, 2006
(RTWT, really)
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4515.html#more-4515
Violating the social compact
Posted by Steven Den Beste on October 25th, 2006
(Out of date, but still a good example of reasoned arguments, in the classic meaning. Of course, SCOTUS short-circuited the collective discussion in exactly the way SdB argued against, with a 5-4 decision in 2015, even though the same-sex-marriage forces were trending toward a legislative win. Some of his contentions are expanded in the comments.)
JimNorCal – Dennis Prager posted an essay with a similar theme to Zman’s.
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2020/04/21/if-half-the-countrys-deaths-were-in-montana-would-new-york-shut-down-n2567282
Talking about blogs… has anybody noticed how google seems to have banned blogs completely?
Years ago, I loved googling for different things and finding blogs with very interesting articles about the topic. Not all blogs were interesting, but many of them were written by people who actually knew what they were talking about. As a source of information, that was priceless. It was probably my favorite thing in internet.
Right now, finding a blog (or a forum, for what matters) is almost impossible. If I need some information, I end up searching either in quora or reddit, because a general search gives almost zero useful results. Main search engines (not only google) just give back the usual mainstream media and recurrent internet magazines again and again. And there’s still interesting blogs out there, but there’s no way to find them unless somebody links to it.
AesopFan, yes I saw the Prager article which I think was linked from RealClearPolitics. We were shocked to see RCP making sense until realizing it was a guest article.
The SdB piece on elections/voting is on point. Why, just think of the Resist people riling us Deplorables by refusing to accept the outcome of ’16
Yann “Main search engines (not only google) just give back the usual mainstream media and recurrent internet magazines again and again”
Yes, I’ve read that groups of large players (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, SPLC, MSM, Dem Party, …) have pledged to work together to stamp out unauthorized opinions. Which they label “misinformation”
Fortunately Trump and Rick Perry at Energy created a system to approve the new generation of small factory made nuclear reactors. They use spent fuel and can’t melt down, they just stop if something goes wrong.
By 2030 they will be deployed at most substations, greatly improving the reliability of the grid and driving the cost of electricity so low it will be almost free. My analogy is the cost of memory and disk storage.
This development will drive change in ways almost impossible to imagine. There will be flying cars, powered by electricity.
Moore has done the world a favor by puncturing some strongly held beliefs among the Progressives.
A quibble: I would categorize Moore’s ignorance as ELITE rather than abysmal.
Neo, Neo, Neo;
I am slightly disappointed in you !!
Surely by now you had realized that liberals believe in their own versions of the basics Laws of Economics and Science
That is, you CAN get something for nothing. In fact, their Laws “prove” (because they say it is so) you can get ANYTHING at all for nothing.
The above IS the liberal, progressive theology.
Presently, the most vocal proponent of the above is that incredibly ignorant, stupid and moronic member of the US Congress, AOC.
The depth of her stupidity and ignorance is so profound, that she is incapable of any rationale thought.
When you hear the utterances of a Moore or AOC, it makes you wonder why these folks are just not deported. Really, I am serious.
Let them live in those socialist utopias they so admire; Cuba and Venezuela immediately come to mind.
Lastly, how the F did AOC get a college degree from Boston Univ (or really, any college) . Boston Univ. should be ashamed.
in 2017 the number of suicides and current covid are about the same now
here are some more facts
The age-adjusted suicide rate in 2017 was 14.0 per 100,000 individuals.
The rate of suicide is highest in middle-aged white men in particular.
In 2017, men died by suicide 3.54x more often than women.
On average, there are 129 suicides per day.
White males accounted for 69.67% of suicide deaths in 2017.
In 2017, firearms accounted for 50.57% of all suicide deaths.
If he was shocked about electricity just wait till he finds out about money.
Right now, finding a blog (or a forum, for what matters) is almost impossible. If I need some information, I end up searching either in quora or reddit, because a general search gives almost zero useful results. Main search engines (not only google) just give back the usual mainstream media and recurrent internet magazines again and again. And there’s still interesting blogs out there, but there’s no way to find them unless somebody links to it.
this is because google is making the same mistake that made yahoo, alta vista and others go to google in the first place… IE. using ai or some algorithm to ‘help’ you find what you want..
when they did this, people had to wrestle with the algorithm to find things as it tended to give you the center of the curve, and the hard thing to find are the tails… add to this its penchant for spelling correction, and you have more problems as it corrects a proper spelling it thinks is wrong with the wrong on, and expands the search on the wrong one.
so the more it helps the more useless it becomes…
i have had this problem as a software engineer many times with bosses who think that this kind of thing is a positive. they REFUSE to look at the negative consequences of things… i suspect the leftists have the same mentality where they see the goal and draw a straight line to it and do not realize or care what can make that goal a negative.
for example, take Blasio letting criminals out of jail under his ideological assumption they are there because of their race, not because some groups have more people with asocial mental disorders and families missing fathers.
ie. he looks through a set of eyes that changes the interpretation of reality in a way that makes him ineffective no matter how effective he wants to be, and the confidence in those views is basically confirmed by how successful he has become using them (despite them).
So its incomprehensible to him that these people would commit crimes. they are not in jail because they committed more crimes than other demographic groups, they are in jail because of the same proxy they want to use to replace people in work… ie skin color… fire the white guys who are killing themselves because they rule the world, and replace them with people that are assumed better because of a pudenda or melanin.. even worse, push the numbers to prove it by gaming the system and not letting people know that there is such unequal benefit applied that the numbers that are saying X performs better are assumed correct because they dont realize that X is getting half a trillion dollars of help from all sides including personal bias, and Y is being impinged from all sides (and yet its not enough)..
so Blasio lets them go, and does not understand the “lack of gratitude” by their going out and behaving the way they did before that got them caught. he assumed in his world view they got caught for race, and that a horrid crime was foisted on them falsely… but they got caught because they are quite antisocial… 89% having no fathers and from single family homes… (ie. improperly socialized as children)… in fact he doesnt even see that his own rhetoric fuels the criminals own world view of X being against him and so doing Y is the justified response.
only comic book villians like being villians and doing evil
Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hitler, Che, Acasio Cortez… they all think they are doing good
that last one is about her calling for a REVOLUTION…
which by the way strengthens chinas resolve to start WWIII..
why? because it thinks that enough Americans of the leftist kind made by feminism’s changes to the social fabric from end to end (no other group did this to this degree and did not use them for this), that they would be helped by their own enemies children.
just as they cant commpute the new green deals outcome, and trust in their leaders to be giving the goodness… and distrust the others for opposing it not really admitting they are not smart enough to understand it (as the women wont admit they are destroying the social fabric)… they will take us to ruin and worse till they get what they are told to want, then as in Venezeula, not want it.
We will change to communist because feminism will make it happen
its the only force that is under control of the politicians who control the thinking of others and tell them up is down, and more… it has set the racialists and the other fringe groups into a seeming semi coherent version of the past factions, where they can even have contradictory groups that the leaders vote their power the way they want.. they work cross purposes of their own ideals and do not have the ability to even see how it makes no sense to get the best jobs and tax yourself into poverty and how that means you cant have children you want to have… or that hating your mates leads to their inabilty to earn and so your inability to want or find mates..
we are changing the cucumber into a pickle
and you cant change a pickle back to a cucumber
meanwhile..
Australia has joined the US in the China sea
the left is trying to cause complete economic break down
their own citizens are willing to saw the branch they are sitting on thinking the tree will fall and they will remain floating as in the cartoons.
but then again… they believe men can be women, that high salaries and high taxes work together, that single parents raise better kids (rather than prisons being full of them), that men without purpose will defend the country that hates them, that the draft for women wont ever happen (so they can make good money in the miltary till the bullets fly), that trans men are equal to women (and so dont pound them into dirt)…
ie. their whole reality compass is off to the point of dysfunction
meaning, its a good time for china and Russia to do things
before we finish making robots and things that will replace stupid.
[robots that walk, do backflips, and more… ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdnJI9T-yXI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q3YW-3KCzU
Optimized flocking of autonomous drones in confined environments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4XpyG4eMKE
heck.. there is a drone that is under 100 that can fly, have a camera, and its AI allows you to assign a target that it will follow and not lose.. (see the police using this later, but war can do that).
30 million men of war age the chinese have to get rid of.
will they go after siberian resources or americans hegemony?
Thucydides will let you know.
ONE last thing to note..
right now the left is upset that trump may be starting WWIII
how? by preventing the Chinese from seizing the lands of others
the resources of others, and using the stolen islands as bases to do so
the people who scream that it was wrong not to stop hitler early
are the same people today who will not let us stop china early
This is how history repeats…
China is seizing the ocean and the resources of half a dozen countries
when you appease them and let them have that, will they stop?
will they be grateful as Blasio and the left believe?
why werent they grateful with just the small islands obama let them take from japan?
why wasnt hitler just grateful for austria and poland?
they right now do not see themselves as the people they believed they are in hindsite… the people who would say, prevent such evil from expanding.. its obvious… IS IT?
they are going to fight to prevent war the way that they fought and prevented WWII…
Their thoughts on the greatness of electric cars and the knowledge of where the electricity to run them comes from is the same as their thoughts on the greatness of socialism and the knowledge of where the money to support it comes from.
Some time back there was an article that popped up on my FB feed that claimed there was a way to make food out of thin air. They were capturing either carbon and/ or nitrogen from the air. It was supposed to be sooooo much better than farming for the environment. I was challenging some of the assumptions in the article and mentioned how some of the chemicals needed would have to come from some other source , which the article mentioned en passing. Some liberal did not want to include those in the carbon footprint calculations, because after all, those chemicals would be made in a “ factory” or a “ lab”…..did not seem to have a clue that raw materials have to go into a factory or a lab….unless her comment was from a conservative making a sarcastic comment. It truly is getting harder to tell progressive insanity from conservative sarcasm.
Maybe Moore isn’t that stupid. Maybe he had to fake it to be credible to his market.
Because there’s a coincidence. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown recently released a statement that we need a one world government to fight the Kung Flu. Seems to me a pretty good indication that the Bigs have figured out that global warming has been wrung dry and isn’t going to take them were they want to go. Need a new looming catastrophe.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
Michael at 10:29 — right on!
All of this just reminds us that with liberals, it is not what works, but what your intentions are. If you mean well — that’s what counts. As distinct from all those rabid right-wingers who don’t have good intentions, and who are motivated by such mundane issues as practicality. Yeah, socialism doesn’t work — but socialists mean well!
To put the airline profit dilemma another way, how big is their customer base if the seats are going to be MUCH more comfortable, but flights cost 5-10 times as much? We’re old enough to remember when only the wealthy would dream of flying.
Dick Illyes: “Fortunately Trump and Rick Perry at Energy created a system to approve the new generation of small factory made nuclear reactors. They use spent fuel and can’t melt down, they just stop if something goes wrong.”
I’ve been scratching my head since reading this.
I checked the calendar, it’s not April 1st.
Could you (or anyone) please provide more detail?
The movie certainly shows that MM has apparently had an epiphany, but he still keeps hating mankind. He found out that some billionaires are evil but he has a lot to discover yet. Anyway I think that the movie should be shown to Guterres, Greta and Pope Francis.