Good News: Solar Panels And Wind Turbines Can Bring World Peace!

Especially if we get them from China, right?

From the Daily Caller article

Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggested that solar panels and wind farms could be the key to ensuring world peace in the future.

Solar, wind and other renewable sources would be key for the U.S. and its European allies to have energy security, Granholm said during her remarks at the U.S.-EU Energy Ministerial hosted by the State Department on Monday. The energy secretary added that fossil fuel dependence puts the West at greater risk of volatile energy prices.

“High energy prices have been putting strains on households on both sides of the Atlantic,” Granholm remarked. “In Europe, you have seen prices go through the roof. Of course, tensions between Russia and Ukraine pose threats to the energy security of the European Union, our friends and partners.”

“All of this underscores the benefits of clean energy,” she continued. “I was at a ministerial last week and my counterpart in Ireland, Minister Ryan, said words that I thought were very interesting. No country has been held hostage to access to the sun. No country has been hostage to the wind. This is not just an energy and climate issue, it is also potentially the greatest peace plan that ever existed.

So, she took a long fossil fueled flight to discuss this? Huh. In fairness, she’s not wrong, energy independence does mean there is no need to rely upon energy from nations like Russia, China, Middle East, Iran, Venezuela. We could do that right now by allow drilling for petroleum and natural gas here in the U.S., while working towards making “renewables” viable, reliable, and affordable, without the need to cover everywhere with solar panels and wind turbines. And, let’s not forget building next gen nuclear power plants.

However, not everything violence is about energy. The Islamic jihadis aren’t fighting due to energy. Russia is not really looking to invade Ukraine over energy.

As for high energy prices, well, the policies of the climate cult elites have done this.

Read: Good News: Solar Panels And Wind Turbines Can Bring World Peace! »

If All You See…

…are horrible fossil fueled vehicles, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Raised On Hoecakes, with a post on more school idiocy and misunderstanding student rights.

Read: If All You See… »

Progressives: Govt Shouldn’t Censor Misinformation, They Should “Mandate Evidentiary Standards”

Here we have “Julia Belluz, a health reporter at Vox and Dr. John Lavis, a professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Together, they worked on the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges.” In other words, people who don’t really do anything, they just like telling Other People how to live their lives, and the NY Times is happy to post their screed

Getting Rid of Joe Rogan Won’t Solve the Health Misinformation Problem

Another week, another platform in trouble for allowing its talent to give voice to misinformation. This time, Joe Rogan suggested that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are a type of “gene therapy” and that young people are at a greater risk from the shots than the disease, among other false and dubious health claims featured on his popular, Spotify-hosted podcast. The calls to remove his podcast have only intensified after revelations that he’s also repeatedly used a racist slur on the show, leading Spotify’s chief to apologize to the company’s employees.

The best outcome of the scandal wouldn’t be that Mr. Rogan was kicked off Spotify, at least not for the health bunk. It would be seeing his misleading Covid content in context: It’s just a tiny drop in the ocean of online health nonsense. (snip)

The problem is so much bigger than Joe Rogan or Spotify. And platforms, lawmakers and regulators aren’t keeping up.

Why should they, unless it is seriously putting people’s lives directly, immediately, at stake? Of course, in Liberal World, that “at stake” is capricious, transitional, spasmodic, always ever changing on a whim. They’re perfectly fine with the notion that Bush made/let happen 9/11, despite all the evidence against it. They were perfectly fine with things like Bush stole the 2000 election. That Trump stole the 2016 election due to Russia, which was debunked. That teaching people that it’s fine to believe you’re the opposite sex, despite the massive mental and physical health issues associated is just fine.

The piece even takes on lots of the crazy stuff at Amazon, from books to supplements to products. And crazy stuff at Netflix and Apple TV, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop crap and other “documentaries”.

It’s clear that misinformation harms human health, stokes panic, wastes money and leads people to miss opportunities to pursue options that could have helped. But the new fire hose of bunk is also harming us in less obvious ways. It’s hitting our fractured societies — and, we believe, contributing to further polarization.

It’s a free society, chumps, something we know you don’t like. Now do transgenders taking away opportunities from real women, harming their lives. Teaching kindergarteners about anal sex. Those are real issues.

…Instead, we need to prevent false or misleading health claims from reaching millions of people in the first place.

Doing this won’t be easy. It will require a mix of strategies, tailored to different platforms and groups. E-commerce sites like Amazon could introduce content warnings or adjust their pricing and ranking algorithms for health products and books that have been flagged for misinformation. Governments could also step in and mandate evidentiary standards for a broader range of health statements than the pharmaceutical and food claims they currently regulate.

See? It’s not censorship. How about mandating evidentiary standards for everything done during COVID, rather than simply watching government freak and just slap restrictions on?

https://twitter.com/StillCrankyAF/status/1490740410561536001

Many Blue states are looking to remove mask mandates for some reason. Oh, and

Suddenly Dems want to consider natural immunity, after blowing it off since Biden took office and was pushing the vaccines, which, if you remember, were supposed to stop people from having and spreading COVID at the high 90% range. What do the vaccines do now?

We also need approaches that would have an impact across the web, like raising the stakes for health professionals who, as two health care experts fighting disinformation wrote, are “weaponizing their white coats” to mislead the public. Right now, state medical regulatory bodies focus on individual patient encounters, not the role doctors might play as healers for the masses. The American Medical Association has commented occasionally on public-facing physicians, yet while doctor disinformation has only worsened in the pandemicfew physicians have been reprimanded by their state boards.

And go after doctors engaged in Wrongthink. Which is basically whatever the Progressives are against.

Read: Progressives: Govt Shouldn’t Censor Misinformation, They Should “Mandate Evidentiary Standards” »

Queen Pelosi Sure Loves To Take Lots Of Fossil Fueled Private Jet Trips

She’d be very happy to pass lots of climate crisis (scam) legislation that would restrict your use of fossil fuels, though

Pelosi spent over $500K on private jets despite claiming ‘we have a moral obligation’ to reduce emissions

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has spent over $500,000 on private jets since 2020 despite repeatedly describing climate change as an “existential” threat the U.S. has a “moral” obligation to address.

According to campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission, Pelosi’s campaign paid a Virginia-based private aviation provider, Advanced Aviation Team, over $437,000 between October 2020 and December 2021 and over $65,000 to Clay Lacy Aviation, a California-based private jet provider.

Private jets are notoriously bad for the environment, producing significantly more emissions per passenger than commercial flights. Pelosi’s campaign spent $67,605 on private air travel just months before she said she viewed tackling the climate crisis as a “religious thing.”

“For me, it’s a religious thing,” she said in November after leading a 21-member congressional delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. “I believe this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards.”

By me and we, she means you, not her. You’re surely not surprise by this, I’d hazard to guess. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis act like it’s a crisis in their own lives.

Read: Queen Pelosi Sure Loves To Take Lots Of Fossil Fueled Private Jet Trips »

Canadian Court Ignores Constitution, Shuts Down Truck Horns

See, in Canada they have this thing called the Declaration of Rights, which provides for peaceful protest and petitioning for redress of grievance, just like here. But, the Powers That Be couldn’t care less about the rights of the plebes if they get in the way

Canada court silences protesters’ horns, police seize fuel

Police in Canada’s national capital said on Monday they have seized thousands of liters of fuel and removed an oil tanker as part of a crackdown to end days long protest against the government’s COVID-19 measures, while a judge granted an interim injunction against deafening honking that has irked residents.

Canada’s capital Ottawa has been gridlocked by a so-called “Freedom Convoy” consisting of truckers and other motorists for 11 days now. What started as a movement opposing a Canadian vaccine mandate for cross-border drivers – a requirement mirrored by a U.S. rule – has morphed into a rallying point against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’ public health measures.

Trudeau, who appeared on Monday for the first time in nearly a week after being infected by COVID, said the protest has to stop. Responding to an emergency debate in the parliament, Trudeau denounced the tactics used by demonstrators. (snip)

The protests, which last week included some Confederate and Nazi flags, have been largely peaceful but an ear-splitting horn blaring by the protesters had become a nuisance. On Monday, a Canadian judge granted an interim injunction preventing people from sounding horns in downtown Ottawa.

The 10-day injunction is part of a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of downtown Ottawa residents, some of whom have said they feel unsafe in their own neighbourhood.

You can bet those flags came from false flags to make the truckers look bad. Perhaps in the future the truckers should just burn stores down, that seems to be just fine. This, again, causes problems with the people in power keeping power. We either stand up for the rights of people we despise, we disagree with, or we do not believe in them at all.

Meanwhile, the Hill trots out a piece which says “individual choices are nice, but, not when they Affect The Whole”

Freedom of choice is a long-held value for Americans, who don’t like to be told what to do. Of interest, our Founding Fathers drew up the Declaration of Independence during the period of Enlightenment, the intellectual movement stressing liberty, science and human progress. Philosophers at the time influenced the acceptance of the social contract — to create a stable society, individuals would give up some personal rights to benefit the group. Today, for example, we agree with the law that says we will not drive while intoxicated —  protecting not only the individual but also others who might be victims of an accident.

The decision against vaccination places an individual at substantial risk of infection and complications. Unfortunately, with a highly transmissible virus, it also places the individual’s family, friends and neighbors at risk. So the exercise of personal freedom creates an unfreedom among those exposed to the infected person. The only way a personal choice is linked only to the individual is if that person isolates herself from society. For example, a family could argue that their child will not wear a mask but would elect to have homeschooling and quarantine.

So, the State needs to take those choices away and force people to Comply.

Read: Canadian Court Ignores Constitution, Shuts Down Truck Horns »

NY Times: Climate Cult Is A Mental Disorder

Obviously, that’s not what they mean, but, it really is what it equates to

Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room
Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone.

It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.

Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.

She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.

In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass extinction. Then she would stare into the dark.

It was for this reason that, around six months ago, she searched “climate anxiety” and pulled up the name of Thomas J. Doherty, a Portland psychologist who specializes in climate.

A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster, published a paper proposing a new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful psychological impact — not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the notion was seen as speculative.

That skepticism is fading. Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary. And professional organizations are hurrying to catch up, exploring approaches to treating anxiety that is both existential and, many would argue, rational.

Why, yes, they really are crazy. The Elites, the media, the activists, etc, push the doom and gloom, which makes the average climate cultists fearful, anxious, unhinged, and so forth, and then they need therapy to reinforce their climate crazy.

Though there is little empirical data on effective treatments, the field is expanding swiftly. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of climate-aware therapists; the Good Grief Network, a peer support network modeled on 12-step addiction programs, has spawned more than 50 groups; professional certification programs in climate psychology have begun to appear.

They’re addicted to doom.

She understands how privileged she is; she describes her anxiety as a “luxury problem.” But still: The plastic toys in the bathtub made her anxious. The disposable diapers made her anxious. She began to ask herself, what is the relationship between the diapers and the wildfires?

“I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life,” she said.

Good grief. This cultish belief set is not good for their mental health. There needs to be an intervention with deprogramming.

Read: NY Times: Climate Cult Is A Mental Disorder »

If All You See…

…is an area being flooded by carbon pollution sea rise, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Lid, with a post on more Whoopi Goldberg Jew hatred.

Read: If All You See… »

Canadian Government Getting Very Upset Over Freedom Truckers, Declare State Of Emergency

See, if this was a BLM/Antifa/Progressive mostly peaceful protest, with the accompanying violence, arson, destroying businesses, looting, and so forth, the government would be fine, since it wouldn’t be challenging the power of the government

Canada police seen getting tough as trucker protests continue

As the protest against the Canadian government’s health measures and vaccine mandates entered the eleventh day on Monday, police have threatened to clamp down after facing criticism for lack of action that has crippled the national capital.

The “Freedom Convoy” consisting largely of truckers began as a movement against a Canadian vaccine requirement for cross-border drivers. But it has since evolved into a rallying point against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s strict measures to fight the pandemic.

Downtown Ottawa, home to Canada’s parliament, central bank, and buildings including Trudeau’s office, has been largely in lockdown after truckers occupied the streets. Late night honking and occasional fireworks have disrupted the normally quiet life of the residents in the city.

A hearing into a proposed class-action lawsuit seeking an injunction to silence the constant honking by truckers will take place on Monday.

On Sunday night, police began removing gas and fuel supplies at a logistics encampment set up by protesters, after the city’s mayor declared a state of emergency on Sunday.

A well-organized supply chain — including portable saunas, a community kitchen and bouncy castles for children — has sustained the protesters. It has relied partly on funding from sympathizers in the United States, police said.

ZOMG, bouncy houses! And, of course they’re saying this is primarily being funded by non-Canadians, despite protests occurring all over Canada at this point. The Ottawa police are very enthusiastic to arrest people who “attempt to bring material support” to people engaged in their Constitutional right of protest. The police do not say what laws people would be breaking. The laws and Constitutional are apparently fungible in Canada. And CTV News is Very Upset that the truckers erected buildings to hand out food and stuff.

Government doesn’t like this, as their power is being challenged. See what happens if the truckers simply go on strike for a month and do not bring food and goods to Ottawa. They also don’t like people having fun at protests

(Breitbart) Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson described the presence of children playing in bouncy castles at the Freedom Convoy demonstration as “disturbing” in a video interview with CTV News on Sunday.

Watson is 60, unmarried, and without children.

Ottawa residents living near the demonstration on Parliament Hill and nearby downtown areas are enduring “a living hell,” Watson claims. He emphasized that they “have been through hell.”

He stated, “It’s disturbing when you see the protest turning into what looks like some kind of a fun carnival, where they’ve got bouncy castles and hot tubs and saunas, a complete insult to the people who are putting up with this nonsense for the last seven days, and it shows great deal of insensitivity.”

Disturbing. As opposed to looting and burning businesses, right, Jim? So disturbing the powers that be want to send in the military.

Meanwhile, in Australia, there is a huge protest at the Parliament House in Canberra. And they are *Gasp* mostly unmasked. Don’t they know that being unmasked is only for the Elites? The latest being Barack Obama.

Read: Canadian Government Getting Very Upset Over Freedom Truckers, Declare State Of Emergency »

Local TV Station, Warmists, Finally Discover Urban Heat Island Effect

Of course, since this is a cult, they’re still going to link anthropogenic climate change to UHI

Raleigh, Durham warming: Data shows cities have several urban heat islands

Many people might not associate a warming climate with cities and urban areas, but a new project shows how much the increasing global temperature it is actually affecting the Triangle.

Yeah, pretty much every Skeptic will associate urban and dense suburban areas (Raleigh and Durham are very much huge mixed use, like so many cities in the South) with artificially increasing localized temperatures.

surprise surprise surpriseIn July of last year, volunteers in Raleigh and Durham used heat sensors mounted on cars and bicycles or carried in their pockets to collect data about how warm areas were.

More than six months and nearly 100,000 data points later, the results are in.

“It’s important to understand that extreme heat is not distributed evenly or equitably across environments,” said Myleigh Neill, with the State Climate Office of North Carolina.

Neill was one of several presenters Thursday night, sharing the findings. One of the most interesting points: parts of our cities are warmer than researchers thought.

Originally it was believed that the difference in the hottest and coolest parts of the cities varied by 6 degrees. However, the data collection reveals that it is actually a wider margin – Raleigh differed 9.6 degrees; Durham, 10.4.

Well, yeah, that’s the way it works. I’m betting my part of the town, right on the edge near the river, away from most of the dense areas and big buildings, is cooler than the downtown area, near the malls, etc.

On the data collection day, volunteers went around the city three times – early in the morning, late afternoon and in the evening to gather readings.

Both Raleigh and Durham recorded hotter temperatures along major roadways – Capital Boulevard and N.C. Highway 147, respectively – during the early part of the day. Researchers noted that during this time, the Triangle appeared hazy and temperatured didn’t reach as high as forecasted due to smoke blowing in from wildfires out west. Still, as the day progressed and temperature climbed to 88.8 and 88.6 in each city, urban heat islands appeared.

Like I thought

“The term urban heat island refers to the fact that metropolitan areas tend to get much warmer than their outlying regions, especially during summer,” said Neill. “Temperatures on hot days can be amplified by paint and dark surfaces like roads, parking lots and buildings. These surfaces absorb and retain [heat] during the day, and then they radiate that heat back into the air. And this drives a significant increase in air temperature and heat index in certain areas within a city which can get much hotter than green areas.”

Yes, we know this. And, it means less cooling at night, because the heat is retained. That also goes with less radiative cooling due to low level smog and other particulates, which is an environmental issue. I wonder how this compared during much of 2020, when the air was cleaner from fewer vehicles on the road and businesses in operation?

Anyhow, they should really compare the data to outside the city, when you get to places like Wendell, Zebulon, Holly Springs, and others. What are their temperatures doing? It’s nice to see that they “discovered” something Skeptics have known about for decades.

Read: Local TV Station, Warmists, Finally Discover Urban Heat Island Effect »

Shocker: Leftists Want Government To Have More Power To “Fight COVID”

In other 1st World nations

But, here in the U.S., Progressives have something else on their minds

Like it or not, the government needs greater power to fight pandemics

“The army is sickly with the smallpox,” fretted General George Washington in 1776. He wasn’t exaggerating when he called the contagion our “most dangerous enemy” — smallpox and other diseases accounted for 90 percent of his army’s deaths. Ultimately, Washington commanded the troops to get inoculated despite their fear of the procedure.

Contagion is, once again, our most dangerous enemy. COVID-19 has killed more Americans than any war, right back to the Revolution. And, as Washington learned, pandemics threaten the United States as much as an enemy in the field. We normally reckon America’s competition with China, for example, by comparing military power and economic might. The rivalry may ultimately turn on how well each copes with the new world of global contagions.

Ordinary Smallpox had a mortality rate of 30%. Other forms were almost certain to cause death. Survivors were left with a bunch off issues through their lives. The vaccine also stops people from getting smallpox, from carrying it, and transmitting it. Period. Early work also dealt heavily with natural immunity measures.

Why is the world’s great superpower failing? Because it is not organized to face the danger. The Constitution does not prepare a complex globalized society to control pandemics. The founders were acutely aware of military threats and gave presidents sweeping authority to meet them. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by the commander in chief’s power. “The President of the United States,” he wrote, “possesses almost royal prerogatives” over the military.

But the Constitution conveys no such authority to combat biological threats whose casualties dwarf those of modern wars. The Supreme Court recently enforced the limitations when it struck down an OSHA requirement that large employers require vaccines or tests to combat COVID. The Court’s liberal dissenters put their finger on the national dilemma: “As disease and death continue to mount, this Court tells the agency that it cannot respond in the most effective way possible [and] undercuts the capacity of the responsible federal officials … to protect American workers from grave danger.”

You can guess where they want to go with this, right?

What should we do? First, there’s no getting around the need for a centralized authority to act in the face of a national crisis. Our political system evolved in an era when no one could have imagined an infectious threat that would rip through North America a week after it was first detected on the tip of Africa. Facing the problem will take changes in executive authority, Congressional process and bureaucratic capacity. Over time and hard experience, Americans vested their national government with sweeping powers over both war and the economy. Today infections pose as grave a threat as a military invasion, domestic insurrection, or economic crash. And the contagions will only get worse. We need to rethink the constraints on national leadership.

Go ahead and run with this, Democrats. We didn’t invest the power, they took it, and it’s very hard for citizens to fight back against the behemoth of the federal government. Give it a whirl on COVID, see how that goes. You think people are rebelling now? The same people called Trump an authoritarian, and the GOP Fascists, yet, they want more centralized authority for COVID, climate change, the economy, you name it.

 

Read: Shocker: Leftists Want Government To Have More Power To “Fight COVID” »

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