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30 November 2019

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Jack

Sir,

Frau. Merkel in a standing ovation speech to the Bundestag said that freedom of expression has limits. Of course implying that she would be the arbiter of what those limits would be.

https://twitter.com/benjaminaboyce/status/1200435438231515136?s=21

She is an excellent example of a Climate hysteric who is progressively shutting down German nuclear power plants which have no carbon emissions to substantially increase the price of electric power for German industry and consumers.

I posted on another thread that we have over a century of weather data at our ranch including temperature and precipitation. The data shows no trends. What it shows is randomness of extremes. The glaciers that formed the Yosemite Valley melted some 10-20,000 years ago. Was that part of climate change too?

JJackson

Ah, guilty conscience for your Armageddon denial. Were the four horsemen there?

Factotum

Relax, California will most likely have broken away from the US, so Lompoc will have already been closed down. Plus by the time Cortez becomes President, it would have to happen over my own dead body. And that is still a long way off. Suspect she will be a one and done Congressperson.

Worry instead that Lompoc has already become the meth capital the state, and the county flower growing industry has rapidly converted to become the largest pot growing acreage in the state. Dystopia has already arrived. We only wish it was a bad dream. Who knew term limits would work out so badly for us out West.

turcopolier

jjackson

You are funny, funny in the head.

TI

"to substantially increase the price of electric power for German industry and consumers."

Not just that, it's also steadily increasing the risk of a major, nation-wide blackout which could easily kill hundreds or even thousands. It's a grotesquely irresponsible policy based on wishful thinking.
Re Merkel's speech about freedom of expression: It's terrible (and the woman is authoritarian to the core, real product of East Germany), but tbh the outrage by Twitter users from countries like Britain, Canada etc. ("Germans at it again") is just silly, their own countries are no different with their draconian "hate speech" laws. It's not Germany that is exceptional, but the US with its constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech (and who knows how lang that will last, US millenials don't seem to be in favour of it according to some polls).

turcopolier

TI
" how lang that will last," Unfortunately, that was probably a typo. Merkel does not seem to have learned much from her experience of the STASI.

turcopolier

factotum

"a one and done Congressperson" Like Lincoln? Too bad about Lompoc. I remember it around 1960 as a bucolic little place.

akaPatience

The writings of Paul Ehrlich were required reading when I was in school. He's an over-population doomsayer whose dire predictions of starvation have failed come true, yet he was nevertheless the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Go figure.

Academics and others have been trying to scare the bejesus out of me since my girlhood. I pleaded with my father to build a fallout shelter in our yard but he declined, agreeing only to keep a vast stock of canned goods in the basement in case predictions of a nuclear holocaust came true. Then in college, zero population growth was promoted in order to avoid human extinction, but to my knowledge only the Chinese adopted the premise on a large scale. Shortly thereafter, a neo-Ice Age was predicted, later to transform into Global Warming, later to transform into to Climate Change.

Every time California burns, which parts of are predisposed to dryness, or lagoon-foundationed Venice floods, there are those who quickly point to man-made climate change rather than man-made land mismanagement.

After so much off-the-mark fear-mongering, it's only natural that one may choose to cast a skeptical eye on dystopian predictions. That professional-entertainer-parents now promote their young autistic daughter into the spotlight to preach paranoia and scold non-paranoids is beyond farcical, it's perverse. We don't have to be asleep to experience nightmares.

Cortes

If President Gabbard is in office perhaps sanctions might include karma demerits involving future reincarnations. Rather like the postliminal adjustments the Romans used to make after the release of long-held captives or hostages, but effective in the afterlife.

Cortes

I ought to have explained that a postliminal adjustment affected the status of high-ranking quality citizens and would involve disentangling the mess created by the absence and presumed legal death of the captives or hostages on their return or liberation.

confusedponderer

Jack,
beyond the benefits of generating electricity and not emitting CO2 nuclear power plants have some disadvantages too - radioactive waste, storing that radioactive weaste, radiation per se (Tschernobyl rests can still me measured in mushrooms in our forests today) etc pp

In that sense there is a point in trying to get rid of these things.

The Belgians have two particularly rotten examples (Tihange and Doel, with series of mishaps) which, when they blow up, would make a many many many many square kilometers in Belgium and Germany de facto uninhabitable - of course only for those who don't like ... shelters, protective suits, geiger counters, breathing masks and/or radiation indicators.

CO2 emitting coal power plants, and the coal mining, are not so marvellous either, and I am not talking about fortunately formerly EPA boss Mr. Pruitt's demented fairy tale that US coal is different from coal in the rest of the world because burning it doesn't cause CO2. I wonder if he was smoking a joint when telling that.

Near my place there was the Goldenbergwerk which is now closed. It was one of the largest brown coal power plants in Germany. When you went there it would realiably greet you with a headache. It was so bad that people moved away quickly if they could.

Around the plant there were bigger brown coal mines, with side effects: When you had linnen on the line outside having the wrong wind direction meant it would be heavily grayed thanks to coal dust from the open mines.

When I was a child groundwater was as low as just 10 cm. Today it has been pumped down to 600 m or so for deeper coalmines, with the wider consequence that the dutch now need to get much deeper water supply wells. Also, some houses here break thanks to the resulting earth shifting.

An aunt told me that the air in the Ruhrpott industry areas in the 50s and 60s was so acidic that it disolved her nylons. Enviromental regulations for filters and the like stopped that. Now we're even having some salmons living again in the Rhein.

Mark Logan

I'm hip-deep in deep liberal here, I don't fear them nearly as much. "Mostly Harmless". The pattern is the Great Plans exist in contact with reality for only a very small time. The leaders are as addicted to money as the next guy, as money is power, and "money" tends strongly towards reality.

The things they say can be disconcerting but it's also true that the dreamers and naifs have the microphone most of the time.

turcopolier

Mark Logan

You don't fear them? Do you fear termites?

Mark Logan

I don't fear the...as much as some. Recently they tried to put a head tax on Amazon employees. Amazon would be on the hook to pay the City of Seattle a few hundred bucks a year for each employee, this was to fund various projects. Lasted about a week and a half. Amazon simply said "good bye", the constrution workers marched on city hall, and presto, no more tax. Torn up before the ink was dry.

I don't fear termites much. Keeping wood dry is a simple matter in these parts, off the ground and out of the rain suffices. Humidity is pretty low much of the time, so wood not in contact with the ground or otherwise constantly wet is safe from the critters.

Jack

You may want to read more about the GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor which could use nuclear fuel waste as the fuel. Of course with most technologies there are risks. However nuclear provides base load power with no carbon emissions. There’s a lot of unnecessary hysteria against nuclear power.

https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/prism1

There are also environmental issues with photovoltaics as the manufacturing process and disposal are toxic.

https://sciencing.com/toxic-chemicals-solar-panels-18393.html

Chris S

akapatience: exactly. Nice dream, but why does the colonel not think he won't be executed post haste by the green Reich? He willl be Soylent Green as an eco holocasut denialist. A federal prison, pfftt.

Tidewater

And weren't there a lot of jokes in West Berlin about the famed 'Berliner Luft', which had become polluted by the use of brown coal by the GDR? Though now the Berlin air is the worst in Europe?

turcopolier

ChrisS

Do you know the difference between a dream and a forecast? When they get control I am dead meat.

turcopolier

Mark Logan
The termites were a metaphor. Who will play the role of Amazon at the national level. We have a leftist government here in Alexandria and nothing seems to dissuade them except budget realities. Amazon's involvement with the city will be residential. We have a lot of streets named for Confederates, a relic of a previous population. The City Council wanted to change all the names last year but learned that this would cost $400 K. They gave that up for the moment.

artemesia

re the Street names: Task the Committee of Correspondence to flood the City Council with letters recommending names.
Way too many MLKs. How about, Mary Queen of Peace Blvd? Dante Circle? Antizionist Bypass?

--
What did you plant in the garden?

Chris S

well a dream is kind of a forecast, I had a dream AOC held Nancy Pelosi's head on the senate floor, but their was such mayhem, that no one noticed.

turcopolier

artemesia

My wife is the gardener. She has made an English style cottage garden all around the house. People often stop to admire it. I prefer the confederate names.

Poul

I can honestly not see what the problem is? She is only reiterating what has been normal practice in Germany for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Federal_Republic_of_Germany


Americans should remember that you have greater freedom to express non-consensus and extreme opinions than in most European countries. Unfortunately that could change if you not careful.

confusedponderer

Jack,
perhaps I have become rotten by NBC detect and decontamination training in the army.

As for the N part I have my memories of the sound of the geiger and decontaminating cars and trucks in the Zodiac (max protection ruber suit). As part of the training we were also went to a nearby fire brigade next to a local nuclear power plant.

The latter gave us the cunning tip that mounting the geiger detector on a stick helps because doubling the distance to a radiaction source means you only get a quarter of the radiation. Cunning but probably not so helping with a ... 2 megaton problem - and then, 300 km sticks are simply impractical.

As for the B part, I am happy to say that that was so far (and may it stay so) limited to nasty flu.

As for the C part, I was ordered to be ready to go during Aktion Lindwurm, or for the US, Operation Steel Box. I am very happy that it was a quiet weekend when VX and Sarin were transported to the Johnston Atoll.

confusedponderer

Tidewater,
I don't know. But Berliner Luft is iirc the name of a local peppermint booze. Perhaps the Berliners drink the bad air away?

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