Home » Open thread 5/11/22

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Open thread 5/11/22 — 28 Comments

  1. I’ve become something of a sun worshiper. When the fog rolls onto the shoreline I often hop in the car and drive to the valley for some sunshine. Or I used to do that.

    The corner gas station hit $6/gal for cash regular a few days ago. It’s not the cheapest gas in town, but it’s close to the cheapest. My car gets about 34 mpg so it could be worse.

  2. And there’s more “reparations” coming down the pike:
    “EPA Senior Adviser for Environmental Justice Wants ‘Environmental Reparations’ to Heal Relationship with Nature”—
    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/09/epa-senior-adviser-for-environmental-justice-wants-environmental-reparations-to-heal-relationship-with-nature/

    Except that she has it exactly wrong (what a surprise):
    “…the illusion of private ownership of land allowed the privileged to feel unconnected to the consequences of their conduct towards the living systems of which those lands are a part.”
    …and…
    “Privileged societies and persons who are disenfranchised, especially societies based upon natural resource consumption, will view any attempt at regulation as an intrusion on their property and freedom…. [L]and as private property, like other natural resources, may have to be subordinated to the common good.”

    Just another good Communist, though in her case, it’s though she’s never heard of national, or state, parks…. Just another aspect of “Biden”‘s brutal full-court press on America…

    (Anyway, I’d like to see Ms. Collin and Hernando de Soto go head to head…)

  3. Does Nature take a check or crypto as reparations for our sins?

    I’ll be shocked to learn that some alphabet agency or a NGO will be necessary to get these payments (indulgences) to Nature.

    Maybe BLM can handle this justice program?

    The “tragedy of the commons” is calling this watermellon.

  4. The real functional solution to Global CO2 issues (this assumes you take such as true) can only come from planting a trillion trees, which is less absurd than it sounds. But the “friends of the Earth” don’t want to take the working solution offered, they want one which is unrealistic, dictatorial in nature (ar ar), and generally fails utterly at benefiting humans in any regard.

    Being nihilistic anti-humans, they prefer the latter “solution”, through evil, malice, or stupidity… or perhaps more accurately, an admixture of all three.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/planting-a-trillion-trees-could-be-the-most-effective-solution-to-climate-change/

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/planting-1-trillion-trees-will-help-save-the-planet-says-congress-member

    Of course, the Barking Mads have forced them to backtrack and hem and haw about “What they really meant”, because, of course, the lying jackals don’t actually give a rat’s ass about nature at all:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/01/ive-never-said-we-should-plant-a-trillion-trees-what-ecopreneur-thomas-crowther-did-next-aoe

    “The brutal maths of climate change is that, as long as emissions are above zero, the world will continue to warm.
    — Zeke Hausfather —

    No, the “brutal math” is that if natural ABSORPTION/SEQUESTRATION processes are less than emissions, then there will continue to increase C02 metrics, with whatever concomitant issues this may result in. Emissions could be 10x what they are now, if we had a means to increase re-absorption and sequestration by a like amount.

    This planet is ALWAYS releasing a substantial amount of CO2 irrelevant of human activity, and it has processes for balancing that. We can clearly add as much as we want to, also, as long as we also add processes for balancing that back out.

    This is so utterly DUH as to make the quote above by Zeke Dufus a clearly intentional and despicable lie.

    Their whole anti-human attitudes were openly displayed in the 60s and 70s, by one of their chief gurus:

    “If you ask me, it would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
    — Amory B. Lovins —

  5. Here’s a comment I left on Althouse, about friendship (her post was on “friends” that just talk endlessly about themselves), that is relevant to me hanging out here, too.
    Plus, I think Neo should switch to substack; maybe Ann, too.

    I had a friend a bit like that, and had to specifically reduce spending too much time with him, but while he loved to talk about himself and his stories, he was pretty good about asking me about my life, too. Too high maintenance after I got married and started having kids.

    Being an American in Slovakia with bad grammar in my usual spoken Slovak, I’ve had fewer friendly acquaintances become friends than I was used to in CA. Plus my lovely wife is also my best friend. (Advice – marry a good friend.) Was always working in English, but am now retired so don’t meet folk at work. This year, as Covid ends, I’ve taken to inviting some almost friends out for pizza & beer, with the hope that they become friends. Including my nearby living brother-in-law.

    I specifically try to find out more about them and their family … but have trouble remembering most details. I’m not even that interested in my own sisters and their families. I do like ideas and talking and listening to interesting talk.

    Tuesday I had pizza for the first time with one such guy with 5 kids, mostly a bit younger than our 4 kids, and we went thru both sets of kids & kid lives. My second son, still at home as he studies for his PhD (in nuclear engineering) ate the leftover pizza I was interested in.

    Don’t quite hang out here for on-line friendships as much as at https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/05/10/rip-midge-decter/
    who just had an alternate view of Midge and some interesting comments about another Midge in the Jimmy Carter admin who one guy had wrongly remembered as Midge Decter.

    A different yet similar vibe there.

    I’m spending a lot more time on intellectuals’ blogs, and more of them are going to substack – where great writers can make thousands per month by having subscribers pay. Two recent converts are recommending substack, and I think both Ann, but especially Neo (deeper analysis) should look into that platform:
    https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-you-should-be-on-substack?s=r
    https://betonit.substack.com/p/who-should-switch-to-substack?s=r

    Here’s a new good substack blog.
    https://infovores.substack.com/p/irrational-institutions-3?s=w << the non-even distribution of our current "Golden Age".

    Advice from a friendly acquaintance/ fan of Ann.
    😉

    I’m actually a bigger fan of Neo. 🙂 🙂

    (Glad edit is here, not sure how to get quotes or indents, tho.)

  6. neo should do what is in her best interest it seems to me.

    Good that substack works for you.

  7. I totally agree that she should do what’s in her best interest – I’m sure she’ll have more readers, more influence on the discussion, and more money on substack.
    For pretty much the same work.

    But possibly have so many commenters, that this cozy hang out gets overcrowded.
    That’s not a “no big deal” in my mind.

    Freddie https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/ gets hundreds of comments, and often only reads the first 100, first hour or so.

    Rod https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ also gets hundreds but probably reads them all. (He’s a founding editor there.)

    (Still, neither substack nor wordpress nor blogger quite work for me, tho I expect to do more time on substack.)

  8. Re: Big waves…

    Call me a fool, call me Ishmael. I wish to return to the watery world. I wish to surf again.

    For several years now I’ve had the fantasy of attending a surf camp and, maybe, I would stand up on a board and ride the waves again.

    But I was in my sixties and now I’m 70. It’s been more than 50 years since my salad days as a surfer. Worse yet, I’ve steadily gained weight until last year I crossed the line into obesity.

    I decided, if I could, to lose that weight. While surfing wasn’t a big consideration — just being healthier, looking better and not having to buy an XL wardrobe were plenty enough reasons — surfing was in the back of my mind.

    So now I have lost that weight. I’m back to wearing 32×30 jeans. With kettlebell exercises my core is solid and I’m stronger than I was at 20. I’m even training on a surfing-oriented balance board which I hope will shorten the terrible stand-up/fall, stand-up/fall learning curve to surfing.

    I’m checking into SoCal surfing camps and it looks doable. My plan is to train more, get stronger for paddling and attend a camp for a week or two at the end of summer.

    Wish me luck.

  9. @ Marisa >
    I read Dr. Wolf’s essay “Oh, Ok, It’s Over – The Always-Unverifiable Pandemic — SO VERY VERY BAD! — Evaporates into Thin Air” (2022-04-28)

    Everyone should read Dr. Wolf’s essay.
    She is absolutely correct.


    So the great apparatus of messaging about COVID was switched off, almost overnight, as the politics clearly soured and as Republicans consolidated an increasingly popular, multiracially inclusive, transpartisan-ly appealing freedom message; and the comms apparatus simply replaced the COVID drama with a new, equally gripping European-conflict drama.

    These dramas are real, of course, but there are also highly messaged; a fact about politics that adults such as these are, would do well to understand at last.

    But — when politics required it — Look over there!

    So now — as I was driving through the sunny valley that looked and felt like it was becoming America again, with freedom coursing through the towns and rural areas like blood slowly returning to a limb that had been asleep — I started to realize what my sense of sorrow really was.

    People who had joined school boards that had masked ten year olds — their lives were back to normal! People who had told family members that they were unwelcome at Thanksgiving dinner — their lives were back to normal!

    Huzzah.

    On MSNBC that morning, Dr Anthony Fauci, that entangled mass of compromised spiritual matter, who had presided over the intentional wastelands of the pandemic; who had for two years delivered in his nasal Brooklyn cadences its lie-based soundbites with their dearth of scientific studies, that wrecked livelihoods, destroyed kids’ educations, and that drove whole communities into destitution — had declared, as if he were God Himself, that the pandemic was over.

    Well — okay then!

    I realized as we drove that my grief was not actually grief. As any pop psychologist will tell you, just beneath depression is rage.

    I realized — I was furious.

    I realized the source of my rage: the labor and nightmares and isolation and persecution and money worries and — well — awful battles waged by us few hundreds, few thousands, had helped these quislings and collaborators have back what — what we had wanted them to have back; indeed, what we had wanted us all to have back; our America.

    The fight was not over — it would not be over til open-ended emergency law was made impossible by new legislation, and until every last criminal was charged and tried; but hey, the folks who had gone along with it all, they were getting their America back, in many ways.

    I thought of the Biblical phrase —that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

    But I wanted — justice.

  10. Marisa, thanks much for that link to Naomi Wolf’s Substack post.

    Remarkable.
    What the hell happened to her???

    (Maybe one day she’ll write about it….)

  11. Yikes,
    just read the Wikipedia article on Wolf, not that Wikipedia doesn’t have an agenda…but the good Doctor (of English Literature!) is simply all over the place. Sigh…

    The common denominator seems to be “wildly contrarian” (to be kind) or “perverse intelligence run amok, with a distinctive expertise in faulty scholarship” (to be less so).

    Holy cow….

  12. An earlier post by Dr Wolf – which kind of explains the one Marisa started us off with.

    https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/im-not-braveyoure-just-a-p-y?s=r

    Some people who love me advised me not to write this essay, and not to use its current title. “Take the high road,” I was advised.

    Usually that is a good idea, but not in this case — not at this moment. In this essay I need to talk about some people — mainly privileged people, people who could make a difference in areas where most can’t — who are trying to justify their monumental, world-changing cowardice, at a time when we all need to be at least somewhat brave.

    I am done with tolerating this quietly.

    For a year and a half now, after it became clear that this crisis was never about “the virus” but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms — since I and many others have been publicly vocal about this danger and doing all we can to alert our community — that is to say, humanity — I’ve been getting direct messages (“DMs”). And they are all kind of similar. And they gross me out. Here’s why.

    In the DMs, people whom I know socially or professionally — people from journalism, from politics, from medicine, from science (most of them upper-middle- class ‘men in suits’) — say something like: “Naomi, I really respect your actions right now. I totally agree with what you are saying. But of course I can’t say anything publicly because [fill in the nonsensical, craven reason].”

    The nonsensical and craven reason that follows this shameful message is typically something along the lines of, “My boss will get mad at me” or “My professional peers will have a problem with my speaking up.” It’s never even, “I have bills to pay.”

    Your boss will get mad at you, O you who DM?

    Do you understand what is at stake? If you continue to comply and collude with what has become a tyrannical oligopoly, your kids will live as slaves and as serfs forever.

    The DMs insist that I am “brave.” But I am not “brave”; you’re just a p—-y.

    Don’t get me wrong. I know the gender politics around ever using the epithet above. Everyone who has read my work knows that, being a woman, I have great respect for women, and for their bodies, and I understand that one does not throw around this epithet lightly or ignorantly or in a misogynist way.

    But truly in such a moment of historic-level cowardice among some privileged and influential people, no other epithet will do.

    I was initially baffled by these messages. Why would I be getting these? What do these people want? Why do they think I need their excuses? So I asked other, braver people WTF this was.

    They laughed and said, “They want you to tell them that it is ok.”

    So I am saying publicly: this is not ok.

    I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risktaking of others, who talk about their “courage.” I feel that this is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.

    It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others, as being somehow naturally better-fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup which is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or somehow fitted better for combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.

    It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner, because they said they were really bad at it.

    I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the current battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they can do to help — in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.

    I love reading the work of a great writer who writes about great things.
    That’s also why Neo’s Place is always first on my list every day.

  13. …Not that there isn’t anything to be contrarian about at the current time, mind you….
    E.g.,
    ‘Garland Perjury? FBI Whistleblowers Say Parents Investigated With Counterterrorism “Threat Tag”‘—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/garland-perjury-fbi-whistleblowers-say-parents-investigated-counterterrorism-threat-tag
    Key graf:
    “An FBI whistleblower has revealed that ‘dozens’ of investigations into parents voicing their opposition to topics ranging from Critical Race Theory to mask mandates were investigated using a “threat tag” created by the agency’s counterterrorism division – directly contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s 2021 testimony denying that the Department of Justice had been weaponized….”

    (Merrick Garland LYING again??? Shocking, absolutely shocking I say….)

    ‘Acting NIH Director Admits Appearance Of Conflict Of Interest In Secret Royalty Payments To Fauci, Scientists’—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/acting-nih-director-admits-appearance-conflict-interest-secret-royalty-payments-fauci
    Key graf:
    ‘Undisclosed royalty payments estimated at $350 million from pharmaceutical and other firms to Dr. Anthony Fauci and hundreds of National Institutes for Health (NIH) scientists do present “an appearance of a conflict of interest,” according to the agency’s acting director…’

    (One might SAVOR the ‘…do present “an appearance of a conflict of interest…”‘ bit…)

    …and much, much more from where these came from….

  14. It’s a real-life Addams Family…

    Bonfire of the Insanities…
    “Biden’s sister invites Meghan Markle to join the Democratic Party because she would ‘of course’ make a good presidential candidate: She defends President’s gaffes as ‘truths’ and confirms he WILL run again in 2024”—
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10800309/Bidens-sister-invites-Meghan-Markle-join-Democrats-make-good-presidential-candidate.html?ito=chromelessDM_0

  15. Huxley,
    Good Luck! And don’t get discouraged. My husband has been surfing Oahu’s North Shore for over 50 years and I have to listen to a lot of grumping about how the prone to upright transition is becoming increasingly difficult. Maybe stick to a long board to give yourself more time? Besides, all the physical benefit comes from paddling out – or swimming after your board!

  16. (He’s a founding editor there.)

    No. He was hired by The American Conservative about 10 years after it began publication. It’s had a number of editors and publishers over the 20 years it has been in operation. IIRC, the founding crew was Patrick J. Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodorogetdrunkfalldowngropegirls.

  17. AesopFan, Eva Marie, Molly Brown, Wesson:

    Thanks very much for the encouragement!

    Molly Brown:

    I figure to restart on a longboard. My first board in 1966 was 9’6″. I went shorter as the short board revolution hit, but I dearly missed the easier paddling.

    Pretty cool that your husband rides the North Shore! He surfs among the gods.

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