A Green New Deal Would Touch Every Part Of Our Lives, Including At Home

By William Teach September 26, 2019 – 10:30 am

Remember, this is all about Science, not politics

Transformative change. Bold transformation of our political and economic systems. Huh. Science!

A green new home
A Green New Deal would touch our lives at every level, including at home

One of the key elements of the Green New Deal is a call to make our homes more energy efficient through weatherization. Homeowners and building owners would receive incentives from the federal government to weatherize buildings by replacing energy-inefficient windows, doors, insulation, and service systems such as electricity and plumbing. Not only would this boost homeowners’ equity, but it would also reduce the cost of utility bills and make our housing stock resilient against the weather changes a warming world brings. And speaking of energy, we’re also going to be installing solar panels, and a lot of them.

It’ll be great when they force you to do these things, costing you more money. Even better when they dramatically increase the cost of refurbing a home and building a home, making the cost of homes very expensive and unafordable for some.

Proposed changes in transportation are an underestimated element of the Green New Deal. All of the proposals see building robust, sustainable public transit systems and weaning us away from car reliance as keys to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As critics have noted, none of the proposed Green New Deal plans go far enough in this regard. But even these limited initiatives would have architectural effects: Imagine not having to waste so much square footage on a place to park your car. We could see a renaissance of the garage band, the garage workshop, and even the (properly weatherized) garage bedroom or apartment. Without car dependence, the aesthetics of new housing would be transformed by eliminating parking lots and decks on multifamily residential housing, and relegating the “snout house” (a house dominated by a front-facing garage) to the dustbin of history. Not only is this sustainable, it saves architects and homebuilders from the tricky task of trying to aesthetically integrate a massive garage.

So, wait, this looks like The Government is going to find ways, including the force of government, to take everyone’s private vehicles away.

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Posted in AGW Socialism, Energy, Global Warming | 9 Comments | Trackback URL

Bummer: Fremont Police Give Up On High Speed Chase When Tesla Runs Low On Power

By William Teach September 26, 2019 – 8:17 am

There are certainly other ways police give up on high speed chases. Safety is one of them. You never hear about them giving up because they ran out of gas

https://twitter.com/JimW_in_NM/status/1176973783124475904

The Godfather Politics post leads to

Fremont police Tesla runs low on juice during high-speed chase

The last thing a police officer trying to chase down a suspect in a high-speed pursuit needs to see is a warning that their patrol car is running low on gas — or on battery juice.

But that’s how it went down Friday night in Fremont — in a Tesla no less. A Fremont police officer pursuing a suspect while driving the department’s Tesla Model S patrol car noticed it was running out of battery power.

During the pursuit of a “felony vehicle” that started in Fremont and reached peak speeds of about 120 miles per hour on the highway, the officer driving the Tesla radioed in to dispatch that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading.

“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec,” Officer Jesse Hartman said.

Apparently, someone forgot to plug it up the previous day, and it’s not like you can just plug it up and have it fueled in 5 minutes like a reliable fossil fueled vehicle

However, shortly after Hartman called out the low juice warning, the person driving the car police were chasing began driving on the shoulder of the highway as traffic was thickening, prompting police to call off the roughly eight-minute chase at that moment for safety, according to police dispatch recordings on Broadcastify and a department spokeswoman.

So the Fremont cops pulled off the highway in San Jose and headed back to their city — but not before the officer in the Tesla made a pit stop.

“I’ve got to try to find a charging station for the Tesla so I can make it back to the city,” Hartman said over the radio.

The vehicle was later found crashed and the driver gone.

The used 2014 Tesla Model S is considered part of a pilot program, to determine whether electric vehicles are suitable for police use on a larger scale.

The department spent a tad over $61,000 to buy the car from Tesla in 2018 — which has its main manufacturing factory in Fremont — and spent over a year modifying the car to get it ready for police use, officially rolling it out in March.

The used Tesla cost approximately $20,000 more than a new Ford Explorer police vehicle that the department uses for its other patrol vehicles, though officials said they expect to save on fuel and maintenance costs over the long run with the Tesla.

Yeah, no.

Read: Bummer: Fremont Police Give Up On High Speed Chase When Tesla Runs Low On Power »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming, Good Move Slick | 7 Comments | Trackback URL

Media Is Focusing On The Whole “Favor” Thing, Which Can Backfire Spectacularly

By William Teach September 26, 2019 – 8:02 am

Let’s be honest: except for hardcore Democrats who despise Trump and cannot get over the 2016 election, along with the #NeverTrumpers, who say they are still right leaning, but are just as unhinged as the Democrats, most people find the “transcript” to be a big nothingburger. Politics as usual. Move along, nothing to see here. But, the unhinged moonbats figured out a talking point, highlighted here by the NY Times

Trump Pressed Ukraine’s President to Investigate Democrats as ‘a Favor’

President Trump repeatedly pressured Ukraine’s leader to investigate leading Democrats as “a favor” to him during a telephone call last summer in which the two discussed the former Soviet republic’s need for more American financial aid to counter Russian aggression.

In a reconstruction of the call released Wednesday by the White House, Mr. Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General William P. Barr and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on corruption investigations connected to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

Although there was no explicit quid pro quo in the conversation, Mr. Trump raised the matter immediately after Mr. Zelensky spoke of his country’s need for more help from the United States. The call came only days after Mr. Trump blocked $391 million in aid to Ukraine, a decision that perplexed national security officials at the time and that he has given conflicting explanations for in recent days.

The aid freeze did not come up during the call, and Mr. Zelensky was not yet aware of it. Instead, he thanked Mr. Trump for previous American aid, including Javelin anti-tank weapons, and suggested he would need more as part of Ukraine’s five-year-old war with Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.

“I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Mr. Trump responded, shifting to his interest in investigating Democrats and urging that he work with Mr. Barr and Mr. Giuliani.

“Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible,” Mr. Trump said.

That is playing fast and loose with the transcript (which, as you know, is not really a transcript, but a reconstruction by people who heard the call, since they are not recorded). Heck, you can read the transcript. The Times gives a link, and here it is elsewhere.

 The· President: I would like you to do us a favor though
because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a
lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with
this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess
you have one of your weal thy people… The server, they say
Ukraine has.it. There- are a lot. of things that went on, the·
:whole situation .. I think you 1 re _surrounding yourself with some
of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General
call you or your people and I would like you to ·get to the
bottom of it. As you say yesterday, that whole nonsense ended
with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an
incompetent performance, _but they say a lot of it started with
Ukraine. Whatever you can do, ·it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

The favor part came during a discussion of Crowdstrike

It is unclear what Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to do regarding the Silicon Valley company, but it has played a role in American politics in recent years. CrowdStrike was hired by the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to investigate how hackers, which it later identified as Russian groups, breached a DNC network and then released stolen emails from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to Wikileaks, just months before the U.S. general election.

According to cybersecurity analyst Andrew Nowinski, Trump is mentioning the company due to rumors that Hilary Clinton’s e-mail server had been mishandled during CrowdStrike’s investigation, and the server is now apparently in Ukraine. Washington Post also reported that Trump has questioned the cybersecurity firm’s role in the DNC investigation by asking on national cable news why the DNC hired CrowdStrike instead of going to the FBI first.

The thing about Biden came up later, and people have been talking about what exactly was going on there. Now, if true, there is real corruption and abuse of office there. You sure you want to continue down this road, Dems and #NeverTrumpers? You sure you want those worms coming out of the dirt? You sure you want people to be going “what did Crowdstrike do? Is that server in Ukraine? What did Joe Biden do for his son regarding Ukraine? Oh, and there’s a China thing?” Internet searches for these things are skyrocketing, which you can tell by the way autocomplete wants to complete certain searches.

Do Democrats want to attempt to defend Biden when more information comes out later, especially after attempting to attack Trump and defend Biden now?

Anyhow, the totally unbiased media has their Narrative, and is just clowning themselves and showing why they are fake news.

Read: Media Is Focusing On The Whole “Favor” Thing, Which Can Backfire Spectacularly »

Posted in Democrats, Donald Trump, Journalistic Malpractice | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

Bummer: Prince Harry’s Eco-Anxiety Leaves Him Struggling To Get Out Of Bed

By William Teach September 25, 2019 – 5:04 pm

But, he has a solution for it

Prince Harry: Eco-Anxiety Leaves Me Struggling to Get Out of Bed

He might look like he’s got it made: a vast personal fortune, a beautiful wife, celebrity friends (and easy access to their fleet of private jets), most of his own hair, and free food.
But don’t let these outward trappings of privilege and good fortune fool you into thinking that the private life of Prince Harry conforms with his happy-go-lucky exterior.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Hit the Beach in South Africa, Advocating for Mental Health and Surfing

Indeed, Prince Harry says he is so crushed by the state of the planet that he sometimes struggles to get out of bed in the morning.

Harry’s reluctance to rise from the royal scratcher would once have been attributed to his party-loving lifestyle, but these days, with late-night japes in Kensington nightclubs a mere memory, it’s more existential fears that haunt the prince.

He made the surprising revelation in a conversation with 18-year-old South African student Peter Oki, who was a guest at one of the many engagements Harry and Meghan are attending during their tour of Africa.

After speaking to Harry, Oki told a reporter for the Daily Telegraph: “Harry said that he often woke up and felt overwhelmed by too many problems in the world and that sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the mornings because of all the issues, but he wanted to use their platform to enable grass-roots change and to try and create a better society.”

Awww. But, he can conquer it by taking a long fossil fueled flight on a private jet to South Africa. Notice the nice long link in the middle to a different story, which I’ve left in? Yeah, he and the family are mucking around, having fun in SA.

The comments came after Meghan left correspondents scratching their heads when she referred, in an on-camera interview, to a global “consciousness crisis” over mental health.

Harry’s comments drew immediate comparison to the doom-mongering of his father, Prince Charles, who said in July that there were just 18 months left to save the world (so, 16 now).

Harry may well have inherited his eco-depression from his father. Ahead of last week’s global “climate strike,” during which children were encouraged to skip school to protest the response to climate change, researchers warned that children are increasingly suffering anxiety and grief about climate change, and urged parents to discuss the issue with their kids in an age-appropriate way. (So, not “The world will end in 18 months, kids.”)

Perhaps they should make a long trek to get absolution from St. Greta. Or, he can read fashion magazine Vogue on how to solve his eco-climanuttery anxiety

The trick is to resist the urge to wallow. Try to find a balance between staying informed and switching off. Be kind to yourself, but also commit to making the effort to act. Find your tribe. You can’t do it alone. I’m part of a community of sustainable fashion change-makers and they inspire me every day. Sometimes I cry about the koalas. Mostly, though, I’m too busy doing to allow the existential crisis to take hold.

Read: Bummer: Prince Harry’s Eco-Anxiety Leaves Him Struggling To Get Out Of Bed »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Climahypocrites, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach September 25, 2019 – 1:00 pm

…is a wonderful low carbon bike which Everyone Else should be forced to use, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Other McCain, with a post on impeachment madness.

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Catholic Missionaries Compare St. Greta To Virgin Mary Or Something

By William Teach September 25, 2019 – 10:30 am

Because of course they did

From the link

The Maryknoll missionaries have thrown their support behind 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, comparing her to the Virgin Mary.

“Christians getting their knickers all in a twist over the passionate, articulate & knowledgeable witness of Greta Thunberg because of her age seem to overlook the age of the Virgin Mary at the time of the Annunciation,” the group wrote on Twitter.

“Young women can & have changed the world,” they concluded.

You know what’s great? How every news outlet seems to be using an Angry Greta photo in their stories, just like

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New Scary Prognostication: Seas Will Soon!!!!!!! Rise Faster From ‘Climate Change’

By William Teach September 25, 2019 – 7:50 am

It’s hard to keep the Cult of Climastrology going without constant prognostications of doom. Plus, don’t forget, much of the U.N. released doom starts coming around this time of the year, as the next Conference On The Parties is getting ready to go (in the far flung city of Santiago, Chile), along with other pre-COP events, where tons of Warmists will take long fossil fueled trips

Landmark UN report warns sea levels will rise faster than projected by 2100

Cities from New York to Shanghai could see regular flooding, as sea levels rise faster than previously thought.

Glaciers and ice sheets from the Himalayas to Antarctica are rapidly melting.

And the fisheries that feed millions of people are shrinking.

These are just some of the impacts that emissions of greenhouse gases have already triggered across the planet’s oceans and frozen regions, according to a new landmark report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

More than 100 scientists from 36 countries worked on the report — titled the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. It is the last of three special reports from the IPCC following last October’s urgent report that showed the world may only have until 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, and August’s report on climate impacts to the planet’s lands.

First, none of those are proof of anthropogenic causation involving “carbon pollution.” Second, they always have these doomy reports, and they never really come to pass, but, that’s never really the point. Rather, they just want to scare people into giving up their money and their freedom. Third, the Earth’s reported temperature has only risen just under 1C since 1850. Even if it makes it to 1.5C, nothing unusual during a Holocene warm period.

This new report paints a full and alarming picture of the rapid thawing happening in frozen regions all across the globe — and how the changes will dramatically alter human civilization in the coming decades.

The findings show that the planet’s warming is accelerating melting in glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland to Antarctica, and that sea levels will likely rise more than previously projected by the end of this century.

Of the major ice sheets, Greenland’s – which has the potential to raise sea levels around 20 feet — is melting the fastest, and lost more than 275 gigatons on average per year between 2006 and 2015. But the even larger Antarctic ice sheet is also shrinking, and its mass loss tripled between 2007 and 2016 compared to the previous ten years.

Because of the growing contributions from Antarctic melting, the authors say sea level rise is now likely to exceed three feet by 2100 if carbon emissions continue to increase.

They’ve been making these prognostications for decades. Remember when they said that NY City would be under water? Neither prediction panned out. Actual data shows that sea level rise is average and not accelerating, and that most of the small area melting in Antarctica is from volcanic activity.

Even if collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet is not imminent, the report says that many of the 680 million people around the world living in low-lying coastal areas will experience annual flooding events by 2050 that used to occur only once a century.

Whoops, they’re trying to weasel out of the scaremongering.

The choices made now are critical to limit the future impacts, and avoid the escalating costs and risks that come with delayed action, the report says.

By choices, they mean lots of taxes and fees, as well as government taking away your liberty, freedom, and choice.

Read: New Scary Prognostication: Seas Will Soon!!!!!!! Rise Faster From ‘Climate Change’ »

Posted in AGW Scaremongering, Global Warming | 7 Comments | Trackback URL

So-Called Whistle Blower Has Political Bias Against Trump, Per IG

By William Teach September 25, 2019 – 7:30 am

This would be the whistle blower who had no first-hand knowledge of what they are claiming

(Fox News) A senior Trump administration official told Fox News late Tuesday that the administration will release a document showing the intelligence community inspector general found the whistleblower who leveled an explosive accusation against President Trump concerning his talks with Ukraine had “political bias” in favor of “a rival candidate” of the president.

The official did not identify the name of the rival candidate. Separately, a senior administration official told Fox News the White House has been working as quickly as it can to release to Congress the whistleblower complaint involving President Trump’s conversations with the leader of Ukraine, as long as it’s legally possible.

The news came just hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initiated a formal impeachment inquiry by alleging that the administration was hiding the complaint. Other top Democrats had previously said such an inquiry was already underway.

The senior administration official told Fox News that the White House had nothing to hide, that there has been no wrongdoing, and that the White House’s general position has been that it will make everything possible available to Congress or the public regarding Trump’s conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

A senior administration official told Fox News there are a “few words” in the transcript that will raise eyebrows, but it is nowhere near as inflammatory as Democrats have suggested.

But, hey, you go ahead with your unhinged impeachment inquiry, Democrats. It’s going to backfire spectacularly as it simply highlights your Trump Derangement Syndrome. As much as Obama did that really could have deserved impeachment, Republicans were never stupid enough to give it a whirl, or deranged enough to talk about. Most of the reasons Democrats want to impeach Trump are because they have policy differences and despise him. Trump will be happy for the fight, and it will really drive up the turnout for Trump voters, and get others to, if not vote for Trump, to not vote for Democrats.

Then there’s this

(Breitbart) Democrats wrote to the Ukrainian government in May 2018 urging it to continue investigations into President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign — collusion later found not to exist.

The demand, which came from U.S. Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), resurfaced Wednesday in an opinion piece written by conservative Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post.

Ironically, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared Tuesday that the mere possibility that President Trump had asked Ukraine to continue an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden — even without a quid pro quo — was enough to trigger an impeachment inquiry. (Biden boasted in 2018 that he had forced Ukraine to remove its prosecutor by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid; he did not tell his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that the prosecutor was looking into a firm on whose board his son, Hunter Biden, was serving.)

The Democrats’ letter is available online here. In it, Menendez, Durbin, and Leahy demanded that the Ukrainian government answer their questions about the Mueller probe, and issued an implied threat: “This reported refusal to cooperate with the Mueller probe also sends a worrying signal — to the Ukrainian people as well as the international community — about your government’s commitment more broadly to support justice and the rule of law.”

Huh, that sounds like they were threatening Ukraine, and colluding.

Read: So-Called Whistle Blower Has Political Bias Against Trump, Per IG »

Posted in Current Affairs, Democrats, Donald Trump | 16 Comments | Trackback URL

Comrade Bernie Excited To Create A “National Wealth Registry”

By William Teach September 24, 2019 – 4:01 pm

Obviously, he wants a big wealth tax, one which would be above his own income level, but, he also has another idea

Sanders targets highest-income Americans with ‘extreme wealth tax’ and ‘national wealth registry’

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday proposed an “extreme wealth tax” on the highest-income Americans, along with a “national wealth registry” that he said would help prevent them from avoiding the tax.

The tax rate would start at 1 percent on net worth of more than $32 million and rise with income above that, topping out at 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion.

Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaign said the tax would raise $4.35 trillion over a decade and would be used to fund “Medicare for All”, along with his plans for affordable housing and universal childcare.

Right, because wealthy wouldn’t just find creative ways to avoid the tax, like keeping it outside of the U.S.

“At a time when millions of people are working two or three jobs to feed their families, the three wealthiest people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people,” Sanders said in a statement. “Enough is enough. We are going to take on the billionaire class, substantially reduce wealth inequality in America and stop our democracy from turning into a corrupt oligarchy.”

On one hand, he does have a point: rich individuals and private entities and some money happy public unions do have an oversized influence on politics at the expense of other citizens and small groups. On the other hand, let’s put some blame on politicians who allow those rich to have that influence on them. Do you think Alphabet Inc (parent company of Google), Microsoft, SEIU and Kaiser Permanente, among others, do not have influence on Bernie? How many Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood folks, among others?

Sanders’ plan includes enforcement measures that he said would block evasion of his proposed tax. In addition to the wealth registry, the IRS would be required to audit all billionaires and 30 percent of wealth tax returns for others paying the highest tax rates.

If you’re trying to find information on what exactly he means by a wealth registry, good luck. I’ve been through around 15 articles so far and not one explains it, nor does Comrade Bernie’s website, which should be very concerning. Democrats love their registries.

(NY Times) “Let me be very clear: As president of the United States, I will reduce the outrageous and grotesque and immoral level of income and wealth inequality,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “What we are trying to do is demand and implement a policy which significantly reduces income and wealth inequality in America by telling the wealthiest families in this country they cannot have so much wealth.”

I won’t say that these uber-crazy wealthy folks are perfect, but, this is about demonizing success, about class warfare, and it never ends the way Democrats want.

Both of their plans would need to be passed by Congress in order to take effect — a virtual impossibility unless Democrats win control of the Senate in the 2020 elections, and far from a sure thing even then. Ms. Warren’s plan touched off a number of questions about the feasibility of creating a wealth tax, including whether such a tax would be constitutional, how it would be enforced and whether it would generate as much money as has been projected.

Pfft, Constitution schmonstitution.

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If All You See…

By William Teach September 24, 2019 – 1:00 pm

…is an area flooded by too much carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Not A Lot Of People Know That, with a post saying to stop indulging the spoiled brat.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 45 Comments | Trackback URL
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