Now, it appears there is hard data clearly demonstrating that solar power is contributing to higher levels of air pollution in North Carolina, which has the second-most solar of any state in the country.
This probably sounds counter-intuitive at first, but after further investigation in makes sense. Solar power ramps up and down based on the sun, as a result, natural gas plants need to ramp their output up and down to make sure the grid isn’t overloaded.
This constant ramping increases the amount of pollution emitted by the natural gas plants to a level that is at least 44 percent higher than if there were no solar panels on the grid at all and the natural gas plant was simply allowed to run at a steady pace.
Adding solar to the grid is like forcing a car to drive in town with the constant start and stop of traffic instead of allowing it to drive in cruise control on the highway.
It seems it’s not the solar power itself that causes the problem, but the way solar and gas power work in concert.
In that same interview I wrote about in Part I, someone named Richard Wolff had a few things to say as well. Wolff’s academic credentials are impressive, if you’re impressed by that sort of thing:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne)…
BA in History from Harvard College (1963);
MA in Economics from Stanford University (1964);
MA in History from Yale University (1967); and a
PhD in Economics from Yale University (1969)
Published work
Now that we’ve established that, here is a paragraph from that Wolff interview that especially caught my eye:
We don’t need and we don’t want — because it’s socially destructive and socially divisive — to have one group of people who work and another group of people who don’t. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone reasonable pay.
Work and money—doled out by a bunch of overseers who “give” people these things—perhaps from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.
More:
Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over redistribution. Do we take [there’s that “we” again], and from whom, to give to those less fortunate — as if it was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn’t work.
To translate—taxation and the social welfare benefits that come from the proceeds are a form of “redistribution” that is just a bandaid on a suppurating sore. The wound is the entire economic system that “doesn’t work.” I wonder who decides what’s working? Obviously it would be Richard Wolff, for starters.
But here’s my very favorite part:
Redistribution tears societies apart, it’s— here’s the parallel: you’re going into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you’re a married couple, you have two children. One is six and one is seven, and you stop because there’s [a] man selling ice cream cones. And you give one of your children an ice cream cone, it’s got four scoops. And the other one, an ice cream cone with one scoop. And you continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other. They’re gonna struggle. What are you doing? And don’t then come up — ‘okay, you’ve had — you’ve eaten this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your scoop to your sister, or your brother,’ — stop. The resentment of the one who hose [???] his ice cream or her ice cream — you see where I’m going? Every parent that isn’t a ghoul understands, give each child the same damn ice cream cone—two scoops each. You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally
I find that passage quite fascinating. First of all, because it uses an example we all can understand: being a parent and getting your kids ice cream cones. And secondly, because it is such a piss poor analogy it shouldn’t be acceptable even from a freshman in an econ course. And yet this is a professor whose credentials seem impeccable. And I bet a lot of people nod in agreement when they read it, thinking yes, I understand that; that’s just the way it works.
Perhaps Wolff is aware of the absurdity of his analogy and hopes his readers and listeners aren’t, and assumes that they will nevertheless find it a convincing argument. We are generally trained in school to take down what teacher says without thinking about it overly, just accepting it and learning it for the test. Perhaps he’s used to being listened to with great respect and acceptance.
Or perhaps he himself thinks he’s made a very good analogy between parents, two kids, and two ice cream cones; and a country’s economy. I don’t see into his mind, so I don’t know.
But if you think for just a moment about what Wolff said there, you can’t help but notice the following problems, which are not difficult to spot:
(1) Manipulating an entire society by any means, including that of a guaranteed Universal Basic Income, is completely and utterly different in scale, scope, intent, and almost every single other way possible from buying your young kids ice cream cones.
(2) Among other things, the parent is an adult and children are children, and the parent or parents control the entire economy of the children (in this example, two children). The parent is in charge and—unless a child is remarkably entrepreneurial—all the child’s income and possessions ordinarily come completely and directly from the parent[s] and a fairly small number of relatives and friends of the parents.
(3) An ice cream cone is an extra, a gift, a treat. Sometimes it’s even a reward (I’ll return to that thought in a minute).
(4) No one would be able to take a society and ensure equality without an amount of control that is unconscionable. It’s been tried, too, and that’s the way it ends up: a horror show. It cannot be achieved even with the best of intentions (which are not often present, and certainly are never present in more than a percentage of the people in charge). Some people will always manage to get more than others, a la Orwell’s great parable Animal Farm. The history of every supposedly or actually Utopian-inspired leftist society, from the small ones such as communes and kibbutzim, to the large ones such as the the USSR, is one of breakdown and/or inequality at best and terrible brutality at worst. Human nature will out, and no amount of social engineering from the likes of the Wolffs of this world will change that—as history has amply and continually demonstrated.
Ah, but this time it will be different.
(5) An ice cream cone is a treat bestowed on a child by a parent, and completely at the parent’s discretion. Some parents might choose to give a child a cone as a reward, however, for something—chores done, grades achieved, something of the sort. If there’s a sibling who didn’t do his or her chores—didn’t fulfill his or her end of the bargain—should that child also get the cone? The same size cone? Not just a smaller or lesser cone than the other one, but exactly and precisely the same cone?
What sort of resentment would ensue then, I wonder? I bet it would be formidable, and rightly so. And next time the parent asks the children to do a chore or improve their grades with a cone for reward, what will be the result?
Now it’s probably best not to use bribes such as cones for efforts like that. But we’re talking cones here. And a salary is not a bribe or a gift from a benevolent parent, it is a payment for services rendered. If it doesn’t reflect the quality of the work done—well, then you get the old Soviet system, where “so long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”
And we all know how productive the Soviet Union became. Why, the Five Year Plans said so!
Perhaps my favorite part of that quote from Wolff is this part:
You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally.
And socialism is capable of doing it? It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically horrific—that a supposedly intelligent person can still believe this, and is treated as some sort of sage.
One last thing—did anyone notice the number of scoops in Wolff’s little example? I think it’s telling. The parent who is fostering inequality and resentment gives one kid four scoops and one kid gets one. The total is five scoops. But when he makes it equal, they each get two scoops. The total is four. What happened to the other scoop? Couldn’t they each have gotten two and a half? Or maybe even three? It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s famous moment:
The other night I was in New York City and encountered what I immediately decided was a microburst.
We were walking (there’s a lot of walking in New York) to a restaurant, and it began to rain. It was a warm night, and the rain was soft and rather pleasant at first.
And then that suddenly changed. And when I write suddenly, I mean nearly instantaneously as well as violently.
It was almost exactly like this (video is from 2010):
Frightening, really. I wondered whether we were about to have a tornado.
A microburst is an intense small-scale downdraft produced by a thunderstorm or rain shower. There are two types of microbursts: wet microbursts and dry microbursts. They go through three stages in their cycle, the downburst, outburst, and cushion stages…
A microburst often has high winds that can knock over fully grown trees. They usually last for seconds to minutes.
The one I experienced lasted about 5 minutes or even less. But those were looooong minutes. There weren’t too many places to take shelter along the way, as most stores were closed except restaurants, and I was following along with a group that seemed doggedly determined to get to ours.
Last night I was looking up something about Charles Krauthammer, and I chanced to come across something he’d written in 1985 that I’d never seen before. It expresses some of his thoughts on abortion, and it struck me that it raises a good point that’s seldom discussed in just this way.
There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge. The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?
How can we expect such a question to yield answers that are not tentative and indeterminate? So difficult a moral question should command humility, or at least a little old-fashioned tolerance.
…[T]here are literally no pro-lifers—and to my knowledge there have been none in the four decades since Roe v. Wade was decided—who argue that the unborn deserve protection because some magical “ensoulment” has taken place. The Catholic Church, to take one prominent institution devoted to the defense of human life from conception until natural death, makes no “theological” argument about the nature of the life in the womb. The Church relies instead entirely on the scientific fact that every unborn human being is, from the moment of its conception, a member of our species.
That may indeed be true. But I contend that the abortion argument nevertheless rests on a disagreement about when the union of an egg and sperm is a human life, a person—and in some ways of thinking, a souled person—with a right to life that supercedes any right a pregnant woman might have to terminate that life growing within her.
There are people who think a pregnant woman’s right to end the life of the fetus lasts as long as she is pregnant, no matter how advanced in age or viable the fetus might be. I believe that continues to be a minority opinion even among the pro-abortion faction, although I don’t have a poll to offer on that. But when does her right to end that life occur? Do she have no such right at all? Does she even lack the right to use birth control and thus prevent conception, which is not an unheard-of point of view either? Does she have a right but does her right last only until implantation? Or for the first trimester?
Abortion is one of those topics that just plain makes me sad. I’ve written about my personal point of view before, here. I will add that the advent of more and more detailed and accurate photos and knowledge of the developing fetus in the womb has contributed to a growing sense among many people that this is a human life very early, and to a growing revulsion towards abortion at any point in a pregnancy.
I often see online references to how unreliable Wiki is as a source.
I used to ascribe to that point of view, particularly when Wiki was first becoming popular. I would add a kind of disclaimer whenever I linked to it.
But I’ve found over the years that, although it’s hardly an impeccable or unbiased source (especially for things related to politics), it’s one of the better places to go for general information on a topic. After all, Wiki ordinarily uses information from other sources, available in its “References” list at the end of each article. The list is often extremely lengthy and includes many of the very sources that people who deride Wiki would consider rather reliable. And then after that, Wiki often has a group of “External Links” to tell you more.
So, what’s with all the contempt directed towards Wiki? One should always take online information—or that matter, any information—with a grain of salt, and read primary sources whenever possible. Wiki is no exception to that rule. But Wiki is a fairly good way to quickly get a host of information from many sources, and I often find it useful.
wikilove:
The state of being completely infatuated with open source media, source codes, wikis, freeware, ect. Wikilove can lead to all sorts of problems, including misinformation and spyware infestation.
“Billy’s in wikilove! He’s downloaded Google Earth, does all his word processing on Writely, and visits Wikipedia ever day. His computer also has more spyware than a sailor has STD’s.”
I notice that that entry is from 2006. The Stone Age of Wiki, which began in 2001.
And here is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Wikipedia—according to Wikipedia.]
True to form, the obituary notice for David Koch in the New York Times today offers up yet another classic case study in media bias and ignorance:
“Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement, strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party and played a significant role in the election of Donald J. Trump as president in 2016.”
Typical. The Kochs hated Trump in 2016, opposed him vigorously throughout the entire nomination process (Vanity Fair ran a story in February 2016 entitled “Can the Koch Brothers Stop Trump?“), and have said more recently they are open to supporting Democrats in part because of their continuing dislike of Trump.
Hayward then points out that the Times has gotten rid of that erroneous sentence about Koch playing a significant role in Trump’s election. Someone at the Times must have been told it wasn’t just incorrect, it was egregiously and stupidly incorrect and needed to be dropped down the memory hole.
(Of course, they can be forgiven, because the story wasn’t about race—and after all, race is The Only Important Thing in America.)
David Koch was a philanthropist but his efforts were not just political. As the NY Postpoints out:
Koch, who fought prostate cancer after being diagnosed 27 years ago, donated a record $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2015 through the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation. The hospital named a cancer center in his name after getting its largest donation ever.
The Upper East Side facility is described as one that offers innovative outpatient and ambulatory care to cancer patients.
In 2013, he also gave $100 million — another record — to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, which has a building in his name…
He was a generous donor to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which named its ballet and dance theater in his honor after receiving $100 million in 2008.
Koch’s network also donated millions of dollars to promote charter schools through two groups, the Libre Initiative and Americans for Prosperity, to provide more opportunities to disadvantaged youths.
He was also a libertarian who gave a lot of money to causes on the right, and that’s why he was so excoriated by the left.
I’ll start with an autobiographical note. When I was young, China was terra incognita. Travel was prohibited there and little news got in or out compared to most of the other countries of the world, including the USSR. It was a big, scary place, even worse than the Soviet Union, and that was saying something.
And yet it had this fascinating, lengthy history of civilization, and a huge population. It was obviously a Force, but the details were blank—at least to those of us in the general US population.
Then came those ping-pong (excuse me: table tennis) players and Nixon’s visit to China in the early 70s. For those of you who weren’t around back then, I can’t over-emphasize how strange it was to penetrate that particular curtain in that particular way, featuring that particular person (Nixon).
Then we were treated to all sorts of visual images: huge crowds of people all weating the same blue Mao jackets, bicycles clogging the crowded streets, exotic food, and the usual glowing descriptions from leftists venturing into this marvelous Utopia.
Over the years, China has become just another country in many people’s eyes. But China has always been different. And China has its own ways and its own big plans.
Which brings us to two recent articles on China. The first is about China’s economic woes, in particular its debt:
China’s debt levels rapidly shot up a few years ago as its banks extended record amounts of credit to drive growth, which led to the Asian giant undertaking deleveraging efforts, or the process of reducing debt.
But the trade war has put a dent in its efforts to pare its massive debt as Beijing sought ways to boost its slowing economy, which was at its lowest growth in 27 years. Earlier this year, banks started to increase its lending again, with new loans surging to a record high…
[Fraser Howie, an independent analyst] told CNBC that the issue was really whether there would be demand for more credit.
“The Chinese economy is clearly slowing, there are a lot of headwinds, there’re companies leaving China. China’s becoming a much harder investment case for a number of reasons. So is the underlying demand there or not?” he asked.
…Chinese economic growth has been flagging, and its workforce has essentially stopped growing. Post-Tiananmen annual growth, unparalleled in history, ranged from 8 to 14 percent from 1991 to 2013 but has tailed off, probably below the official 6 percent level.
And, thanks to China’s longtime one-child policy, its working-age population has been declining, down 3 percent since 2011. For years, one big question about China was whether it would get old before it got rich. The answer seems to be that it has gotten old about halfway up the path. Poverty is way down, but incomes significantly lag those in North America, Western Europe and East Asia, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, just as the United States once lost low-skill manufacturing jobs, so China is now.
And then there’s the political:
Deng Xiaoping’s decision to kill thousands — maybe tens of thousands — in Tiananmen Square showed the permanence of the communist regime, which had already started to spark — or permit — economic growth…
The hope through these years was that a more prosperous China would also become more democratic and tolerant at home, and less aggressive abroad. But as foreign affairs journalist James Mann pointed out in his 2007 book, “The China Fantasy,” and as longtime Kissingerian Michael Pillsbury wrote in his 2015 book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” China’s leaders weren’t interested in following this script.
On the contrary, Pillsbury argued that they had their own scenario, in which China would embark quietly but steadily on a long-term race to world supremacy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek.
China would use strategy and tactics laid out by Sun Tzu 2,500 years ago and restore the state to the primacy it enjoyed before the civil wars and invasions that started with the Taiping rebellion in 1849 and ended with Mao’s death in 1976…
Barone goes on to say that the Chinese leadership could easily crush the Hong Kong rebellion, but it may have costs. How this will play out is anyone’s guess, but it appears to be a signal—one of many—that the status quo is being shaken up, and perhaps the long era of treating China largely as though it wants what we want is over.
…who’s every bit as deficient in the “likability” department as Kamala Harris, but who seems to be doing pretty well and even gaining some support. Why is that?
…Warren is scary for reasons beyond herself. She is no more likable than Harris and should have been buried by the fiasco about her heritage. But she is a leftist true believer which is exactly where the Democrat party is now. And even lying about her background doesn’t hurt her with Dems because it also reflects what they are – completely unscrupulous about using identity politics to gain power.
I had originally thought—when Warren declined to run in previous presidential election years—that she would be considered too old to run in 2020. But in this field she’s practically a spring chicken. And, despite her schoolmarmy vibe, she looks very good for a woman her age: trim, not especially wrinkled, and energetic.
But her real appeal is the same as Bernie Sanders’ was in 2016: she and he are the True Believers. At least, I think they are, despite contradictions and the hypocrisies you can point out between their political philosophies and the way they live their lives. They seem sincere—and although the “seem” is all that really matters in an election, I think they are sincere as long as their politics don’t require them to take vows of poverty.
Since the Democrats are now officially leftists, Warren is quite acceptable and even desirable to the party in that sense. She has a certain gravitas that the young ones lack, and unlike the even-older Biden, she doesn’t appear to be poised on the mentally-losing-it border.
Warren also has whatever it was that made some people like Hillary Clinton (yes, some people liked Hillary): a feisty quality that reads as “strong woman.”
FOAF is quite correct that to most Democrats, Warren’s history of using identity politics based on a lie about herself won’t matter. It’s easy to explain away as “But she was merely mistaken; she believed herself to be part-Cherokee.” In the scheme of things, what choice do Democrats have? Warren is one of the most viable candidates—Hillary 2.0 without all the baggage (although Warren has some of her own, it can’t compare in heaviness); Bernie 2.0 without the advanced age and the New York leftist shtick; and creds as a real leftist who can be trusted to do the lefty thing once in office.
In National Review John McCormack tackles the question of why Harris’s poll numbers have been falling after an early rise. His answer involves her back-and-forth waffling on busing and Medicare for All, as well as her record as a prosecutor. He concludes:
So Harris’s problems go deeper than the fact that she had one good debate followed by one bad debate on matters of style. Both debates revealed she has serious weaknesses on matters of substance. And the hits keep coming on Medicare for All: On Monday, she was savaged by Bernie Sanders after it was reported that Harris told wealthy donors in the Hamptons that she was not “comfortable” with Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, which she co-sponsored and supported until a few weeks ago. There are still five months left until the Iowa caucuses, but the past two months have demonstrated that Harris has deep problems that she can’t paper over with some well-rehearsed, well-delivered lines in subsequent debates.
All of that is true, and it probably matters. But I have a different take on it. Have you ever noticed how voters can forgive a candidate almost anything if they like that person? One of Hillary’s big problems, for example—one Obama correctly sensed in the 2008 race, when she was his main rival—is that she’s “unlikable.”
So is Kamala Harris, IMHO.
Likability isn’t what I tend to look for in candidates, although it’s a plus because any president is someone we’re going to hear a lot and see a lot for quite a few years, and it helps if we like that person. And of course different people have different criteria for who’s “likable.” For example, I never really felt Obama’s likability; for me his policies got in the way. But I could see that he had a kind of smooth, polished charm that would appeal to a lot of people.
I don’t know what it is about Harris—I’d describe it as a certain harsh quality—but she just isn’t especially likeable. A lot of things about a candidate can be changed, but not that.
In contrast, one of the reasons Biden’s numbers are still up despite everything, is that he’s widely perceived as likable, affable, convivial. I seem to be tone deaf to Biden’s personal appeal as well, but I recognize that he’s apparently got some.
The majority of Jews certainly do vote for Democrats, as Trump noted. But it’s not that simple.
For some secular Jews, leftism has replaced Judaism as their religion. Not all secular Jews are leftists, however, although a great many leftist Jews are secular. However, not all religious Jews are conservative, either.
I couldn’t find any extremely recent polls on Jews, religious identity, and political affiliation. But in a poll taken in 2013, the breakdown in that regard was quite interesting, I think.
Among Orthodox Jews in the US, 36% were Democrats or lean Democrat and 57% were Republicans or lean Republican. In the political sense, 12% called themselves liberal, 27% called themselves moderate, and 54% called themselves conservative. The poll did not, unfortunately, differentiate between “liberal” and “leftist”—which I believe is an important distinction. My guess is that few of those 12% of Orthodox Jews who identify as liberals are actually leftists.
Conservative Jews (that is not a political designation; it’s a sort of moderate in-between version of Judaism) have a different breakdown entirely. They are 64% Democrat or lean Democrat, 27% Republican or lean Republican. Politically they describe themselves this way: 35% are liberals, 38% are moderates, and 27% are conservatives.
Reform Jews, a group that is by far the least conventionally religious of the lot—and the most numerous—are almost identical in their politics with Jews who are secular and don’t identify with any part of the religion at all. Reform Jews are 77% Democrat or lean Democrat whereas secular Jews are 75% Democrat or lean Democrat. Reform Jews are 17% Republican or lean Republican and secular Jews are 15% Republican or lean Republican. 58% of both groups describe themselves as politically liberal. For politically moderate the figures are 27% for Reform and 26% for secular. The figures are also identical between the two groups for political conservatism: 13%.
A 2003 Harris Poll found that 16% of American Jews go to the synagogue at least once a month, 42% go less frequently but at least once a year, and 42% go less frequently than once a year.
The survey found that of the 4.3 million strongly connected Jews, 46% belong to a synagogue. Among those households who belong to a synagogue, 38% are members of Reform synagogues, 33% Conservative, 22% Orthodox, 2% Reconstructionist, and 5% other types.
Because Orthodox Jews have a lot more children than other Jews, and because they don’t intermarry whereas the incidence of intermarriage is high among the other groups of Jews, Orthodox Jewish percentages in the US are on the rise.
People often make remarks and observations about Jews as though they’re a unitary bunch. They most definitely are not. There’s an old Jewish saying: Two Jews, three opinions.
…is the fact that the Democrats were the party of slavery as well as the party of Jim Crow and segregation, and the Republicans were the anti-slavery party.
If slavery is so very central to the entire story of America, you’d think they might at least mention that it was the Democrats who were major drivers of slavery and of post-slavery discrimination.
But I guess that’s an inconvenient truth.
[NOTE: This post originally contained a video of a segment from yesterday’s Laura Ingraham show on which Dinesh D’Souza spoke about the Times‘ omissions and/or errors in its 1619 Project, including the paper’s failure to mention the historic role of the Democrats. However, between last night (when I wrote notes for the post) and today, I cannot seem to find the video. At any rate, I have some obligations today and won’t get back to it for a few hours. So for now, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
