By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: The Green New Deal, recently advocated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could start the biggest decade for government projects since the 1960’s Great Society & Apollo. Big beyond most people’s imagination. But it has received little critical analysis (other than calling it “socialism”). Here is a brief look at it, analytical not political. This is a brief first cut at it.
The original New Deal
“Extreme remedies are appropriate for extreme diseases.”
— From Hippocrates’ Aphorisms.
They were desperate times requiring desperate remedies. The banking system was in ruins. There was massive unemployment (nobody knows how many, roughly a quarter of the workforce). Businesses were falling like dominoes. Germany showed what might happen here: in the 1930 election the Nazi Party got 18% of the votes, the Communist Party got 13%. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor (FDR took office in March).
The need for immediate action forced use of unconventional and untested methods. The unused economic capacity of America, both plant and people, meant that even fantastically large fiscal and monetary stimulus (larger than any in the 1930s) would cause no inflation. Of course, Americans did not know that in 1932. The first thorough explanation was published in 1936: Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It was a gamble, done by an alliance of progressives and populists. We won.
But that does not mean that gamblers always win, or that high stakes gambles should be made in normal times.
Incite panic to begin a Green New Deal
“Let’s stipulate right now that America is in the midst of overlapping crises that are worse, arguably, than anything we’ve seen since 1861 …”
— January 20 article by Will Bunch, nationally syndicated columnist.“What to Care About When Everything Is Terrible.”
— NYT op-ed by Quinta Jurecic (managing director of Lawfare).
The Left wants to copy aspects of the New Deal, despite our very different circumstances. First, they have to create panic – convincing America that we have emergencies only they can solve. Since that is false, they must rely on propaganda. The barrage of warnings that Trump will end democracy is one such campaign (despite its absurdity after two years). “Donald Trump’s War on Democracy” by John Feffer at The Nation. “Is Donald Trump Ending American Democracy” – about Brian Klaas’ book, The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy. “This Is How American Democracy Ends” by Bill Blum at Common Dreams. “The Suffocation of Democracy” by Christopher R. Browning at the NY Review of Books. “Does Trump win mark the end for liberal democracy?“, a BBC news story by Ben Wright. Plus the many hysterical columns by Paul Krugman (e.g., here, here, and here).
The use of questions in headlines to arouse irrational fears is the basis of Betteridge’s Law: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Another campaign seeks to arouse panic about global warming. The latest phase has abandoned the consensus of scientists, as represented by the IPCC and major climate agencies. As in the July 2017 article by David Wallace-Wells in NY Magazine: “The Uninhabitable Earth” (expanded into a book: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming). Climate scientists seldom criticize even the most outrageous exaggerations and misrepresentations of their work by alarmists. But this went too far. Some spoke out, such as those quoted in this WaPo article – and especially this FB post by Michael Mann. His summary…
“The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”
But the NY Mag article went viral, becoming their most successful article ever. So imitators multiplied. NakedCapitalism’s valuable daily links (a guide to the Left’s perspective on events, which I read every morning) cites such articles several times per week). The common elements of these…
(1) A lack of context. Historical – present vs. the past. Quantitative: big numbers to scare, such as gigatons of ice – not mentioning the percent of the ice cap or time required for significant melting. And outright misleading: ocean warming in Joules not degrees (e.g., the ocean heat content of the top 700 meters warmed by 10^22 Joules over 1955 to 2008 – which is 0.17°C).
(2) An exclusive focus on highly improbable worst-case scenarios, often presented as likely. The most frequent example is RCP8.5, a well-designed worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s AR5. It describes a horrific scenario, and the large changes in long-standing trends required for this to happen. For example, the given path to RCP8.5 requires fertility no longer dropping with industrialization (esp. in Africa), although this has been so everywhere else (and doomsters now warn about the coming population crash). And technological progress slowing to a crawl, although it appears to be accelerating (perhaps beginning another industrial revolution). The result: a crowded world in the late 21st century in which coal is again the primary power source (as it was in the late 19th century). Alarmists describe these incredible trend changes as “business as usual.” That’s a lie. For more information, see these posts about RCP8.5 and climate scenarios.
(3) Attributing all extreme weather to climate change. The most mindless example is the recent California wildfires (see the analysis by climate scientist Cliff Mass of the Camp Fire). The US Southwest had a century of grossly inappropriate fire suppression followed by building in nature fire zones – in a region in which fires and long droughts are natural. No anthropogenic climate change necessary to produce this disaster – and the ones to come.
Of course, AO-C is out front on this issue – making statements without little in climate science. Even the worst-case RCP8.5 will do little in 12 years.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” {See the video.}
Panicking the American public is a smart tactic. It has worked before, and might do so again.
“Mr. President, if that’s what you want there is only one way to get it. That is to make a personal appearance before Congress and scare the hell out of the country.”
— Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about starting the Cold War. Truman did so in his famous speech on 12 March 1947. From Put yourself in Marshall’s place by James Warburg (he helped develop the US WWII propaganda programs).
See posts about fear and about doomsters. Such as these…
- Requiem for fear. Let’s learn from failed predictions to have confidence in ourselves & our future.
- Threats come & go, leaving us in perpetual fear & forgetful of the past.
- Dreams of apocalypses show the brotherhood of America’s Left & Right.
- Collapsitarians and their doomster porn.
- We love scary stories. The reason why reveals a secret about America.
- Our fears make us weak and easily manipulated.
- America suffers from the Crisis Crisis, making us weak.
Problems with the Green New Deal (GND)
Inflation and debt.
Most measures suggest that the US economy is running at or near capacity. Another massive fiscal stimulus might spark inflation, as the combination of the Vietnam War and Great Society did in the 1960s. That becomes especially likely since some versions of the GND advocate Fed action to suppress interest rates. Spending cuts – such as to DoD – could offset this. But US history suggests that such grand plans seldom pass when combined with such measures.
Advocates often point to the many workers not in the labor force. But that is a mirage. First, many lack the skills needed to fill jobs created by the green energy industry. Second, there are not that many of them. Many of those not in the labor force are retired or disabled. One measure is the number of people not in the labor force but looking for work: putting them to work would increase the labor force by 1%. Click the graph to enlarge.
Second, this is a bad time to boost the federal deficit. Keynes recommended running fiscal deficits during recessions and paying down that debt during expansions. That hard won wisdom has been successfully used many times.
Massive debt was incurred – correctly – during the Great Recession. Now we should be paying it down. Ahead lies another recession (timing and size unknowable). More importantly, we will run massive deficits as the Boomers retire from Social Security, Medicare, the various Federal pension plans, and the inevitable bankruptcies of corporate pension plans (the Federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s multi-employer plan will go broke by 2026). America can easily manage this demographic transition by borrowing, assuming we do not run up too much debt now.
Building uneconomic infrastructure.
Programs like the GND tend to result in massive construction of uneconomic infrastructure as everyone jumps on the gravy train. Enthusiasm and dreams provide opportunities for tapping the taxpayers for billions or more.
Worse, many of the Greens promises are based on flawed accounting. Most seriously, they calculate the cost of wind and solar (intermittent sources) without including the cost of upgrading the power grid to handle their fluctuations – and the back-up power sources required when they falter. The physicist and energy expert Robert Hirsch described these problems 13 years ago (“Electric Power from Renewable Energy: Practical Realities for Policy-makers” in The Journal of Fusion Energy, gated) – and Greens often ignore it today.
Words to fear.
“It’s inevitable that we’re gonna create industry and it’s inevitable that we can use the transition to a 100% renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic social and racial justice in the United States. This is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot, the civil rights movement of our generation. That is the scale of the ambition that this movement is going to require. …
“It’s important to also talk about the fact that this is not just an economic solution is that this is how we this is the mechanism through which we can really deliver justice to communities that have been underserved. The water in Flint is still dirty. We’ve got children that are that are choking on the smoke in California. …Children in Puerto Rico are choking on the fungal spores because we have not recuperated from the crisis, and the mold from the floods is taking up all of these people’s homes. Those injustices are concentrated in front-line communities and indigenous, black, and brown communities. They’re the ones that experience the greatest depths of this injustice.”
— Ocasio-Cortez during a panel discussion with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and activist Bill McKibben (See YouTube).
The size and scope of the Green New Deal has grown over time, becoming a Trojan Horse for a panoply of Leftist dreams. They plan a restructuring of America’s economy and society, fueled by what they see as limitless government spending. They have dreamed about this moment for generations. The proposal combines commonsense infrastructure upgrades (never done because not a priority for either party), speculative drastic changes to the energy infrastructure, and a growing list of social engineer programs.
They are offering all good things, promising that it won’t cost the public a dime. Experienced people see this as a once per generation pot of gold. Unsurprisingly, the polls show strong bipartisan support.
History is littered with similar stories. Most end badly. Her analogy to the “moonshot” is apt, as Apollo was twenty billion dollars burned for almost no benefit to America. Enthusiasm for the GND reminds of Athens just before it launched the Sicilian Expedition. Its people saw the fantastic benefits of success but closed their eyes to the cost – and the risk. Like most such projects, it ended badly.
Listen to Ocasio-Cortez. Hear the certainty in her voice. What is its source? Not her personal experience with public policy, social or civil engineering. But with ideology. She and her cohorts will roar ahead with the enthusiasm of fanatics. Many or most of the GND’s designers are professors. My guess is that this will be another big bold Leftist experiment in social engineering – with us as lab rats – and will end as badly as the others.
“I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
— William Buckley on “Meet the Press”, 17 October 1965.
Trust me!
I do not share your opinion of Apollo. The technology developed during the program was quite a return.
Some of the spinoff benefits claimed by NASA are dubious, but IMO enough are valid to justify the costs in life and treasure. It’s not just Tang:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5893387/Apollo-11-moon-landing-top-15-Nasa-inventions.html
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2525898/app-development/nasa-s-apollo-technology-has-changed-history.html
The US military has however produced a lot more technological breakthroughs and improved training, skills and education levels than has the space program. Throughout history, advances have been driven by defense, from the spoked wheel to metallurgy to the screwdriver to nuclear power to electronic computers and sterophonic sound. Well, OK, the screwdriver was more for jousting than combat.
Sorry, but those are somewhat bogus; and, if they were really so important, it would have been much cheaper to develop the technology on the ground and forget the whole Moon landing business.
ICs, for example; they already existed before Apollo, and while the space program accelerated the progress of early ICs into usable mass-market components, at worst we’d be a few years behind on CPU tech if that hadn’t happened. Which is effectively where we are right now, because CPUs have barely improved in the last few years.
And you have no way to tell what other innovations would have been created if that money had been left in taxpayers’ pockets and not blown on a political stunt.
Yes, Apollo was a great technological achievement, but it was a brute-force approach that left behind very little useful technology that could have been used to build a sustainable presence on the Moon. Worst of all, it eliminated the desire to be the first to land there, which could have justified private investment over the years that might have built a sustainable base there by now. Instead, it’s taken fifty years to get to the point where we might soon be going back.
I agree that much would have been developed anyway, even if not as soon.
There were some intangible benefits, however, to include the Space Race as a strategic and propaganda struggle in the Cold War. Moon rocks have definitely contributed to our understanding of the geologic history of the Earth-Moon system, or at least hypotheses concerning it.
Not spending the money at all might have reaped more rewards than letting the federal government spend an equal amount on something else. Saturn V was pretty amazing, though. Like so much other lunar exploration tech, however, it’s now just a museum piece.
I was a geology student in the early 80’s , and our department was lent a flight-case of moon-rock samples in thin section. Compared with terrestrial samples they were totally un-weathered. Beautiful, and quite awe-inspiring. These were bits of another world, had cost zillions of dollars to bring back, and muggins, a spotty student, was looking at them down a microscope. I could hold that case with bits of the moon in it. Something I’ll never forget.
Yes, moon rocks are marvelous and essentially priceless.
Some day they might just be paper weight conversation pieces, but not yet.
MarkG,
Your argument rings rather false with your unwarranted assumptions regarding the “Null hypothesis” in that we would have all these everyday technological advances absent a technological need.
In a word NO!
Many technological ‘spin-offs’ resulted from the space race. Most were merely additional applications to other earthy endeavors. None of these would exist without the driving ‘need’ for them.
The list is quite vast and given enough patience I’m sure I could rattle off many without much thought, but here are a few:
Mechanical Pencils
freeze-dried foods
Velcro
hand held calculators
Metalized plastic films
Not to mention al the advancements in Launch vehicle technology.
Many similar comments strike me as similar to the conspirators in Monty Python’s movie: “Life of Brian”
They started with: “Name one good thing the Roman’s ever did for us!” Then rattled off a list of huge benefits.
Well, Andean Indians did beat us to freeze-drying food, by virtue of living at high altitude in the Tropics.
But I can remember when modern freeze dried food replaced Bernard’s packaged food, state of the ’60s art.
All flippancy aside, many of the “modern convenience foods” we have on the supermarket shelves today would not exist without the original drive for human life support in outer space.
There were already “driving” needs for everything in your list.
…NO there wasn’t.
What was the driving need for Velcro? We had zippers, buckles and buttons. There had been no need for Velcro until the requirements for secure relocating/adjustable, non dust making, non adhesive residue system to secure items were determined.
So a niche product was created…then came the explosion of alternative applications. ONLY then with 20/20 hindsight, does somebody sit back and say well it works so well in these applications it would probably have been invented anyways.
The driving need is that industry is always looking for something better.
If you think that there was nobody interested in hand held calculators before NASA, then you’ve never worked in any organization that had to process lots of numbers.
What was the driving need for Velcro? We had zippers, buckles and buttons.
Velcro is faster, more convenient and in many cases lasts longer than zippers, buckles and buttons.
What was the driving need for ice-makers? We had water, trays and cold.
Innovation is driven by all sorts of engines, at least one among them the desire for convenience.
As for calculators, you really should investigate the 4004 and 8008.
Regardless, do you remember mechanical calculators? If you don’t, your parents and grandparents do.
Do you really believe that the companies that made and used those slow and expensive beasts would have no interest in an electronic calculator?
From there, hand helds are nothing more than the next logical step.
There was nothing special about metalized plastic films. As soon as the need arose, they would have been created.
As for electronics in general, the aviation industry was looking for anything that would decrease weight and improve reliability.
The military likewise was looking for the same.
Computer makers wanted anything that would be faster and more reliable.
For all of these, electronics, including CPUs and Math Processors fit the bill precisely.
People may have wanted a small, portable calculator. But without advancement on many fronts they had no idea how to make one. At the time, a portable mechanical calculator was a little bar with 5 or 6 dials on it. You wanted to add, you entered a number by rotating the dials, right to left, and then added another number the same way. Multiply? Add the same number the desired number of times.
A similar handheld mechanical calculators were available, about size of medium book and operated like desk top adding machines. It took a fair amount of thinking to get operations in the right order, plus you had to check the result. Most people in high school today could not do that, given the low level of math skills most have.
“There were already “driving” needs for everything in your list.”
That’s easy for somebody to say that probably hadn’t even been born then.
Building an electronic calculator is trivially easy.
Hivemind. Really? Is that actually the best you can come up with?
Read a little history, assuming someone can guide you to that section of the library.
That’s easy for somebody to say that probably hadn’t even been born then.
It doesn’t matter whether one’s been born “then” or not. Born in 1452, Da Vinci dreamed of flying, even putting a prototype model to paper. Depending on whom you believe, the dream became reality +/- 449 years later.
@rocketscientist February 11, 2019 at 1:19 pm
You forgot sparkless. The way I heard the story that was the only reason they needed Velcro. In the space suits, buttons were a non-starter, with those thick gloves they were never going to get a button fastened. Same with tying knots in rope/string/twine.
Zippers could have worked for some things but they were worried about the possibility of sparks. Thus the need for a non-sparking fastener.
Rocketscientist,
Most of that is false.
(1) NASA explicitly says that velcro was not a spin-off. Nor was Tang or Teflon.
https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/home/myth_tang.html
Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer in the 1940s.
https://hookandloop.com/invention-velcro-brand/
(2) Mechanical pencils were invented in the 16th century and made practical in the 19thC.
http://www.historyofpencils.com/writing-instruments-history/history-of-mechanical-pencils/
(3) Development of launch vehicle technology was mostly driven by military needs (weapons) and to launch unmanned devices into orbit. Apollo played a minor role in this multi-generational program.
(4) Freeze-drying of organic products
This was developed by the Incas in the 15th century, and made practical for wide-spread use in the 1930s (first freeze-dried coffee: 1938). It was widely used during WWII.
https://www.thoughtco.com/freeze-dried-food-4072211
(5) Mechanical calculators? That’s deep wishful thinking.
Yes, Velcro was invented by a guy who wondered why a certain kind of seed sticks to clothing and fur. Had the idea in 1941 or so, patented it in 1955. Went commercial in late 1950s.
There are an awful lot of stories that someone just makes up one day, and then they take on a life of their own.
Salt causing high blood pressure was one of those. Never any studies done, it was one guy who more or less decreed it so. Even when proven false in multiple huge double blind studies, and that for some people too little salt actually raised BP… medical organizations nevertheless refused to stop telling everyone to eat less salt.
That is how cemented in place wrong ideas can and often do become.
Similar thing is ongoing with telling people to stay out of the Sun because skin cancer.
It has been proven that vitamin D supplements do not provide the same benefit, and people that live in high sun locations have LESS skin cancers, most doctors still refuse to give what is really the best advice based on the evidence…get some Sun on bare skin for at least 15 minutes every day. Instead, they tell people never go into the Sun without head to toe clothing or sunscreen.
There is something wrong with people.
We know it based on global warming alarmism and credulity alone.
The biggest result of this GND, besides the advancement of ‘Progressive’ ideology and suppression of liberty, will be the massive transfer of currency to China. Who do you think will be supplying the wind turbines, solar panels, copper wire, electronic components, etc.?
My belief is the answer is ‘the same as supplies most of these things today’. ie. CHINA ( with India on the upswing). I’m not saying it has to be that way but I am saying it will be that way.
As for the actual benefits to the USA, those will be absent or negative.
Sputnik alerted the world to the fact that the Soviet Union had an intercontinental ballistic missile. Apollo demonstrated conclusively that the United States could win a nuclear war. The defining moment of Apollo was not Apollo 8, nor Apollo 11. It was the landing of Apollo 12.
The main objective of Apollo 12 was to land near the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had landed on the Moon on April 20, 1967, and collect samples from the spacecraft. In order to do so, NASA had to know where Surveyor 3 actually was. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiters (LRO) were used to map the surface in the vicinity of where Surveyor 3 was believed to be. The US Geological Survey then matched the overhead photography with Surveyor’s panoramic terrain photography.
Bear in mind that all unclassified maps available in the Soviet Union at the time were deliberately wrong, by a few miles here and there. This was to prevent invaders from using openly available maps to plan their attacks.
Apollo 12 landed a mere 600 feet from Surveyor 3, after a 250,000 mile approach. This demonstrated to the Soviet Union that the US could find the targets we wanted to find, and hit them with extreme accuracy. The resulting panic spending on the part of the Soviets helped bankrupt them, and bring about their fall.
It was a very cost-effective way to win a war without a single non-combatant casualty I can think of.
Uhhhhh, Mr. Kelly,
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (there was only a single one) was launched to the Moon on June 18, 2009. Apollo 12 was launched to the Moon on November 14, 1969 . . . almost 40 years earlier.
I don’t believe that LRO carried a time travel machine, but I could be wrong.
As to how this speaks to the credibility of the rest of your post . . .
Gordon, while he may have confused the name of the program with a similar named program from decades later, the context makes clear he was talking about the Lunar Orbiter Program that took place during 1966 and 1967
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_program
That you’d try to make cheap shots about time travel rather than attempt to understand the point he was making speaks to your own credibility…..
Yes, as John Endicott indicated, it was the Lunar Orbiter program that mapped the lunar surface.
Lunar Orbiter was an unclassified program at a time when even the name “Talent Keyhole” (our military recon satellite program) was classified Top Secret/SCI/SAP. The Soviets, of course, knew that we had a terrestrial reconnaissance satellite capability. What Lunar Orbiter and Apollo 12 demonstrated was that we could find anything we wanted to (despite the false Soviet unclassified maps), and hit it over an arbitrarily large range.
I’m not making this up. My career started in system engineering for the MX/Peacekeeper ICBM. I’m familiar with the methodology and means for developing the strategic target list, as well as the history of Apollo 12. Further, Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad and I were business associates in the mid 1990s (I learned a lot of back room space lore from that). Lunar Orbiter imagery was, indeed, crucial to targeting the Apollo 12. And it did, in fact, have the payoff I described.
Apollo 12 was able to land close to Surveyor 3 without benefit of LRO observations.
Parts of Surveyor were returned to Earth for analysis of the effects of longer term exposure to the lunar environment.
Not the LRO of the 21st century – The Lunar Orbiter Project of the mid 1960s. Five missions to photograph the face of the moon in detail – all successful – during the course of one year between August of 1966 and August 1967.
I agree. It’s also about curiosity, exploration, finding out what’s “out there”. At the time it was more about national pride, but it served other purposes. It also led to further space exploration: The voyager missions, Viking, etc, etc… Should we not have undertaken those as well?
No humans went to the Moon. The technology for going through the van alen radiation belts isn’t practical for space travel yet.
Watch Bart Sibrel’s documentaries.
Look at the fake photos, where the crosshairs of the camera are under objects, the background doesn’t change for different locations, the photos are taken from impossible angles, since the hasselbad was sensed to be fixed to the chest. It is also quite incredible the quality of exposure of the photos knowing they couldn’t see what they were photographing and adjust iso. NASA was and probably is fully of nazis. Von Braun did a trip to Antarctica, the place on Earth were it is most easy to find Martian and Lunar rocks. It seems they had some problems identifying the rocks correctly because some rocks claimed to be from the moon were analysed and found to be from Earth. The surface of the moon is highly reflective, no need for a mirror. The photos of the moon site by the chinese don’t show anything about a human presence. The wind was blowing on the moon, yeah right. There is no crater below the lunar module on the dusty surface, there is not even dust on the lunar lander legs! It takes two people to put the lunar suit, you can’t help your friend once you put it on. Also the lunar module was too small for them to change.
For some reason the technology of going to the moon has been lost according to NASA. Strange, usually technology improves with time. The telemetry of the voyage to the moon has been taped over, strange for an event that is sensed to have made humans enter the realm of myth.
The biggest ennemy of the Americans is their governments.
The technology to fake a moon landing did not exist in 1968, so that is a particularly woo-woo conspiracy theory.
In 2001 A Space Odyssey we can see the Earth from Space and incredibly realistic front screen projection. It was made prior to the supposed moon landings. There were so many problems for SpaceX rockets to land vertically, but 6 times in a row 237 000 miles away from Earth there was no problem. Oh by the way in the recordings they are sitted on a rocket engine while descending, but everything is silent, you can hear the voice calm and clear. For the moon walk just speed the video 2x, it’s normal walking. The chinese image shows nothing. Remove the captions and compare to any other place on the moon. Rocks roll, there are craters.
I guess the climate story didn’t tell you enough about the history of propaganda of your government. Just a thought, I would have place a camera pointed at the Earth on the moon, that would have been pretty cool. But instead we brought 3 jeeps and golf clubs.
Frantxi, bout the only thing you got correct in your two above postings, was this, to wit:
Frantxi – February 11, 2019 at 7:29 am
And Frantxi, iffen you had learned your High School science then you wouldn’t have posted this silly comparison, to wit:
“DUH”, iffen they had attempted to “vertically” land the SpaceX rockets on the Moon, they would have been successful 6 out of 6 times, …… and that is because the force of the Moon’s gravity is only 1/6th of what it is on the Earth. Compared to “crash” landing on the earth, it’s like floating down to the Moon’s surface.
No kidding, Frantxi, …. bet you didn’t know that the Moon does not have an atmosphere. And no atmosphere (vacuum) means no can hear sound vibrations. But a vacuum no problem for radio transmissions.
So best you find a “legitimate” problem for your disbeliefs.
Actually, if SpaceX had tried to land on the Moon it would have been much harder, because their engine can’t even throttle down low enough to hover on Earth, let alone on the Moon. That would have meant they’d need a much more difficult ‘suicide burn’ to land there than they use on Earth.
And the primary reason they had a hard time landing was because they were trying to land on a boat which is small and moves around. As soon as they were able to return to land, they did it perfectly.
The Apollo lunar landers had highly-throttable engines which allowed them to hover, and they had humans on board to pick a landing site. Compared to the SpaceX landings, it was easy.
Hey Samuel, that lack of atmosphere that explains the limited engine noise of the moon lander ALSO helps explain why Vertical Landings are easier on the moon.
Just ask anyone who has made a vertical landing here on Earth. Helicopters, balloons and blimps, VTOL’s like the Harrier, rockets or even just a parachute. The greatest hazard of going vertical is wind. The speed and even direction of the wind can dramatically change every few feet as you go down.
And under a full G like here on Earth most vertical landers are using most of their thrust just to keep them up. Not much left over for compensating for the ever changing wind.
~¿~
STanley Kubrick did not use front-screen projections, Frantxi. You are VERY wrong about that.
He used cutouts and harsh lighting.
Now are you going to tell me and others that we don’t have a flag planted at the 1st Apollo landing site, when NASA’s current lunar orbiter has not only photographed it and its shadow, but also the moon buggy tracks and junk left behind by subsequent Apollo missions?
Please grow up, And stop spraying vinegar at the chemtrails. They’re just water vapor and CO2/CO and not much else.
Sara,
He did use front projection for the Dawn of Man sequence, but not for Earth, which he made too light a shade of blue.
A good review, despite grammatical and pronunciation errors”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgNyCluIRhA
Wow, is this a serious “We never went to the moon” believer?
You never even mentioned the you tube videos of the astronauts which proved they were liars because they do not act like people would act who just went to the moon.
*rolls the eyes*
Why would anyone place a camera on the moon to look at Earth?
By then there were already plenty of spy satellites in orbit, which have a way better view.
And starting in 1964 there were satellites in geosynchronous orbits.
And the first weather satellites started going into orbit in 1959.
Personally, I think it is and was “pretty cool” that we have some jeeps on the moon just waiting for us when we get back. I plan to be the first person to drive one of them to the beach up there wearing a tank top, jams, and some RayBans!
And is taking a golf club to see how far a ball would go any more frivolous than Elon Musk sending his Tesla up into space and playing some David Bowie on the radio?
Did Elon really do that? Hmmm…there is no air in space, so how did we hear it?
Just think how many of our Grandma’s ashes could have been sent instead?
Frantxi,
In case you are really pissed about the “no camera on the moon” thing, I have this pic for you.
I have it on good authority it still looks vera much the same:
http://hdwallpapers2013.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Earthrise.jpg
Geostationary orbit is well above the VanAllen belt. So to reach geostationary orbit, the satellite has to pass through the VanAllen belt.
So much for the claim that the technology to get a satellite through the VanAllen belt didn’t exist.
April 1 is still 7 weeks away.
Is that when the 9-11 Truthers come out?
Faster than gravity 🙂
The 9-11 truthers never went back in.
They have been at it non-stop.
At this point they have scads of videos “proving” that it was everything from nano-thermite to directed energy weapons.
The planes everyone saw on live TV were really holograms.
They have a real live pilot who swears that hijackers could not have flown those planes and of course he must be believed because, well…he is a pilot fergoshsakes!
And if an architect and an engineer are on the same stage declaring that they KNOW for sure that those buildings cannot have fallen without it being a rigged demolition, well…who can doubt a real live architect and a gen-u-wine engineer (they never did say what kind of train he drove though, so…)?
They never found any plane parts, when the next video down on the you tube list has pictures of plane parts and dead body parts all over the ground and stuck to the sides of buildings.
Aluminum cannot cut through steel, everyone knows that…but we also know that at half the velocity of those planes, a drinking straw can imbed itself 6″ deep in a tree during a tornado (I saw one with a vinyl record album imbedded into a palm tree so deep it came out the other side…without breaking!)
The other day some guy on a FB thread was ranting about how no plane parts were ever found at the Pentagon, and he was damn sure he knew what he was talking about. Search engines on his computer could have shown him the dozens of huge parts that where strewn about had he ever once bothered to look.
There is something wrong with people.
I’ve read that it comes from a desire to feel special.
In their minds they have penetrated a conspiracy that has fooled the vast majority of the population. For many of them, this is the only accomplishment they can claim in their lives, so they don’t let go of it easily.
Some mothers really have them!
Landers and rovers seen from orbiting telescope:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html
And if you don’t trust NASA imagery, then how about independent observers and listeners?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings#SELENE_photographs
Chinese rocket scientists know that the US sent men to the Earth-facing surface of the moon and brought back rocks, which is why they went for the dark side.
Well, its not the ‘dark side’, unless you mean by ‘dark’ the side we do not get to see from Earth’s perspective.
That’s what I meant. A colloquial term not technically correct.
Far Side maybe better.
Far Side is already taken.
IMO Gary Larson got the name from the moon.
He’s Tacoma’s answer to Portland’s Matt Groening.
There is no dark side of the moon, really.
Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
-R. Waters
Interesting that Japan sent a probe to the moon and went to one of the landing sites.
Did they have people who doubted it too, and sent it up there to shut them up?
Of course, some pictures prove nothing to someone who is skeptical. Too easy to fake.
They can make videos of live humans saying stuff they never said.
And monkeys with an AK-47 shooting people.
[SNIP. Personal attacks are not tolerated here. -mod]
Not an argument.
At least John brought interesting things on the table for me to look at.
Cool, the Friends of Cook has arrived. Don’t let me detain you. Bonjour.
It was Stephan Lewandovsky et al who wrote the moonmark paper which tried to smear skeptics with the moonhoax crap. Yuck.
No, skeptics are realists. It is the wind and solar proponents who are anti vax anti gmo motivated reasoners…
The ‘high quality’ paper is below. Referenced from Wikipedia so it must be good /insert sarc here/ stuff (or, as good as the political activists who have taken over the article in Wikipedia…)
In fact, there should be rule here that certain non-climatic conspiracy claims are just wiped to oblivion instead of them collecting a long list of badly trolled commenters. /not sarc
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236083096_NASA_Faked_the_Moon_Landing-Therefore_Climate_Science_Is_a_Hoax_An_Anatomy_of_the_Motivated_Rejection_of_Science
100% agreed. Someone hand the Mod a Sword of Troll Slaying, please.
No, skeptics are realists. It is the wind and solar proponents who are anti vax anti gmo motivated reasoners…
Nonsense. That’s with a broad brush you paint. Regarding vaccination, some of us apply the same depth of research into that epic corruption as we do the CAGW scam.
To dismiss it out of hand, which clearly demonstrates you are not consistent in your distrust for establishment science when the bad science and corruption is outstanding… Don’t forget, 2/3rds of science is not reproducible.
Also, hospital error is the third leading cause of death in America, to the tune of 251k + deaths per year
You haven’t familiarised yourself with the national vaccine injury act of 1986, and the serious implications that accompanied it.
Or Dr. Paul Offit, Ms. Gerberding… Massive conflicts of interests.
CDC got exposed for lying straight up about the swine flu by Sheryl Atkinson but the story was pulled last minute by CBS.
MSM and politicians on the major dole by big pharma, who by the way, isn’t really interested in curing anything:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
This isn’t the forum to have an in depth debate, but the information is quite extensive to at least justify skepticism regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccination.
Vaxxed is a great place to start to see if your view is sound or whether it requires challenging.
Wakefield has been seriously misrepresented and attacked, much in the same way as Curry, Steyn, Anthony, etc..
It is rather frustrating to see inconsistency do prevalent, but i suppose that comes with the unrelenting support of all things corporate with right leaning tradcons. Big corporation big government all the same
No one ever claimed vaccines do not and never have had any problems or occasional bad reactions.
But it is a lot of lightyears from those issues to being anti-vaccine.
It is difficult for me to imagine how anyone who has any knowledge at all of the history of disease prevention could try and make a case that vaccines are “bad”.
It is no contest…a long list of awful, horrible diseases, and another list of ones that are merely bad but kill some percentage of everyone who gets them, that are either completely erased as a scourge of mankind, or else have drastically cut infection rates and saved countless people from deaths and disfigurement and permanent disabilities.
I worked in the space program and know it was real. What a conspiracy nut!
I’ve always wondered how you guys faked the launches of the Saturn Five rockets in front of thousands of on-lookers, and millions more watching on TV. That must of taken a lot of work!
/sarc
Hurray for Hollywood!
In Florida. With expensive props. And the most credible of passengers. And of course those thousands of eye witnesses and tens of millions of TV viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzCsDVfPQqk
And all those rocket and capsule failures and deaths. Obviously faked too.
Anna, Anna, don’t you know?
The greatest technology to come out of the Apollo program was CGI and Pixar! 😎
I’ve always been amazed at how so many hundreds of people could not only fool all their co-workers, but maintain all the secrets for 50 years, despite all the fame, fortune, and celebrity that would result from spilling the news!
And even Russia was fooled, despite the fact that the entire US government was crawling with Soviet spies!
The Soviets kept quiet so that they would be in a position to help Trump win the presidency 60 years later.
I too worked in the Apollo and later space programs on the orbit insertion and and re-entry tracking side. Anyone who still doesn’t believe needs to look at the actual data. They obviously are willing to be led by those so ignorant to lack understanding of basic math and physics.
BTW, the very first micro/mini-computer on a board I ever saw was mounted in Apollo.
Sorry wrong site it was ‘Lew’s paper ‘ , the same paper held up as ‘proof’ that AGW sceptics are conspiracy nuts, that made it clear it was AGW proponents that where keen the claim Moon landings where faked. Try Realclimate or similar sites as they are the people that support you ideas.
So we can’t mention the impossibilities of free fall collapse of modern constructed skyscrapers purportedly due to office fires but this lunacy gets a pass?
It’s not an impossibility.
The 911 conspiracy is _not exactly_ much more brainy than this. Yeah, I definitely know for a fact an uncontrolled fire can take a reinforced concrete structure down. And yeah, the parts will go down so fast it is basically free fall. The higher bulding, the nearer the limit. The key is the energy freed, which is so large that the remaining structure just ‘explodes’ to stones and dust. Less tall a building could stand longer after an initial structural breakup.
Nicely highjacked comment thread, though.
What’s a high jack? Who’d know, I don’t.
Well there are thousands of forensic engineers and architects that disagree but that’s fine. Understanding of physics is kinda weak on this site.
There is zero evidence for explosives in either the WTC towers or building 7, and all the evidence in the world against that fantasy, as per NIST:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/design/a3524/4278874/
It’s hardly unusual for 3000 conspiracy kooks to be wrong.
Matter of fact, there aren’t.
But what the heck, if you believe one lie, you might as well believe 1000.
For “impossibilities”, please read “fact”.
Thanks!
There was no free fall speed collapse, and the buildings did not fall into their own footprint, and yes fire can weaken steel, and yes those buildings were heavily damaged by the planes, and yes there was a weak link in the structure (the bracket that held the floor trusses to the outer wall of columns) and blah blah blah.
Such bullshit!
But those engineering professors will really get you going…until they start talking about directed energy weapons, showing a picture after the cleanup had started and from a certain view with did not show the hundred foot high rubble piles and stuff scattered for over a city block in every direction.
The bullshit from truthers makes warmistas sound almost rational.
No technology is needed to get through the Van Allen belt.
Every single claim by the No Moon landing quacks has been completely refuted.
>>
the background doesn’t change for different locations,
<<
One of the problems on the Moon is that there’s no atmosphere. Here on Earth, the hazy effects of the atmosphere makes distant objects look farther away. Without that visual cue, you can’t tell the distance of objects. The mountain on the Moon was kilometers away, although it look like it was just a few meters away. The background didn’t change because those objects were far away.
>>
The wind was blowing on the moon, yeah right.
<<
What wind? The dust kicked up by the lunar lander engines is exactly what you’d expect. The US flag was supported by a horizontal bracket (easy to see if you’re looking).
>>
The surface of the moon is highly reflective, no need for a mirror.
<<
But the Moon’s surface is not a mirror. The mirror left on the surface is a corner reflector. Such a mirror reflects incoming parallel rays back to the source. The Moon’s surface would reflect laser light in all directions–almost nothing back to the source. The corner reflector is still used to obtain an exact distance to the Moon. The distance is slowly increasing which is what you’d expect–as the Earth’s rotation is slowing too. Angular momentum must be conserved.
>>
There is no crater below the lunar module on the dusty surface, there is not even dust on the lunar lander legs!
<<
Dry dust wouldn’t stick to much. There was probably a shallow depression under the engine. It’s like measuring snow depth–without a ruler it all looks pretty flat.
The dust kicked up by the astronauts can’t be explained except by they being in a vacuum. The technology to make studio-sized vacuum chambers still doesn’t exist. The lunar vehicles kick up dust which moved in perfect parabolic paths. If there was any air around, the dust wouldn’t settle immediately. One movie of an astronaut shows him tripping and almost falling down. He caught himself, but he also kicked up a lot of dust in the process. That dust settled immediately–as if he were in a vacuum–which he was.
Jim
Come on, guys . . . it is just impossible today to be as ignorant/misinformed as Frantxi is posing to be . . . he/she is a troll.
Didn’t you seen the sign: “Beware of hooks”?
it is just impossible today to be as ignorant/misinformed as Frantxi is posing to be . . . he/she is a troll.
Then you would argue this is a troll as well?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/11/about-the-green-new-deal-dreams-given-form/#comment-2624130
No, because AOC and her like-minded cohorts are NOT claiming anything has been faked to fool the American public. In fact, it’s just the opposite . . . it is they who are trying to fake the American public about the urgency and need of the 10-year GND despite its obviously impractical content.
They are far, far more dangerous to civilization, as we know it, than are mere website trolls. And therefore, any article calling them out for such is well-deserved, IMHO.
No, because AOC and her like-minded cohorts are NOT claiming anything has been faked to fool the American public.
Who’s talking about AOC?
That’s right Frantxi. They faked it ALL and then covered it up so well that the mindless masses have not once found evidence of who and where and when and how the faking was done, and can instead only use the small errors as clues.
GOSH.
What is more, the Russians and every other nation with tracking equipment were in on it too. No point after all in CLAIMING you had a something on the moon when Comrade Cosmos at the Spaceograd Tracking Station could simply measure the time lag in the radio transmissions and work out something was dodgy. Hence the Russians were TOTALLY in on the cover up and why not. What could they possible lose out on in international bragging rights if they helped ‘prove’ that the USA had successfully managed to put men on the moon. Helping to fake a second place in the Space Race was after all nothing compared to the secret joy of helping to pull off the world’s biggest joke.
Also, to fully mock you some more, yes the technology to go to moon as been lost. The KNOWLEDGE to go to the moon still exists, but since no one has built this sort of rocket for generations the actual technology, or perhaps more correctly, the INDUSTRY, has been allowed to decay.
We could not build the Titanic today. We could build a very large ocean liner but not the Titanic. No one builds ships that size using 1910s technology because the industry no longer supports massed plate and rivet construction and no one builds the steam powered engines anymore. We could NOT build another Titanic, and unless you also believe the Titanic was faked your entire argument is still bollocks.
Honestly, you are meant to be an adult, Frantxi. Think for yourself and logic your entire ‘moon landing’ bollocks out to its logical conclusion. Occam’s Razor. Either they had every single world science organisation in on the cover up (just to make the US look good) AND managed to completely destroy EVERY single bit of hard proof and keep EVERY single person involved 100% silent… OR… They went to the moon.
It happened.
Deal with it.
You may have turned Frantxi into a Flat-earther! As such, there’s no need to even fake a moon landing!
Craig from Oz
You present my favorite argument (Duh, The Russians could track our spacecraft too) beautifully. I was rolling.
Especially the computer. The Apollo 8 computer was housed throughout the module, in the walls, under seats, all over, in order to get it all in there, there just wasn’t enough room in one place for all of it. You could have infinitely more computing power, at phenomenally better speeds, with my iPhone. Or even the Samsung Galaxy X. And fit it into a slot on the “dashboard”. (Speaking of dashboard, imagine doing all those knobs and switches with a single touch-screen computer!) So the “technology” wasn’t lost, even if the actual “as-builts” for each module, and the necessary lifting package, no longer exist. You wouldn’t use those today anyway.
Hey Frantxi,
Not all the telemetry was taped over. Residing proudly on my wall is a paper strip chart of Buzz Aldrin’s vital signs when he stepped out on the moon.
It was given to my by my Father who was a Telemetry Manager during the Apollo program.
Every person in that telemetry site knew exactly where their antenna was pointed. It was pointed at the moon.
There was no technology that was developed for the space program. With the exception of the rocket engines themselves, absolutely everything used by Apollo was already in development in the private sector.
Even rocket engines were already under development by the military, for their needs.
Not even Tang?
Powdered drinks existed prior to Tang.
If I remember correctly those were called “Fizzies”.
(Oh wait! Those were tablets. Never mind.)
PS I remember pestering my Mom to buy some Fizzies. She finally gave in. I also remember being very disappointed. But I did like Tang. (Don’t ask me why.)
Tang was concocted (1957) before the space program, and first marketed in 1959, but was popularized by it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink)
MarkW, sorry, but that is preposterously wrong.
“The design principles developed for the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) by MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, directed in late 1960s by Charles Draper, became foundational to software engineering—particularly for the design of more reliable systems that relied on asynchronous software, priority scheduling, testing, and human-in-the-loop decision capability. When the design requirements for the AGC were defined, necessary software and programming techniques did not exist so it had to be designed from scratch.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
As but one example of many.
Even if true (it is wikipedia after all), so what. You are proclaiming that event driven software could never have been invented elsewhere when the need developed elsewhere.
I can assure you that everyone who has ever programmed a peripheral has dealt with asynchronous, event driven software, and none of us referred to NASA modules to figure out how to do it.
NASA and it’s worshipers like to pretend that if NASA did something first, that proves it could have never been done elsewhere by someone else. Even when it already had been done elsewhere by someone else.
This is like saying that the fact that Henry Ford was the first to invent an assembly line proves that nobody else could have done it.
MarkW posted: “You are proclaiming that event driven software could never have been invented elsewhere when the need developed elsewhere.”
No, I never stated or implied any such thing. Try rereading—and more importantly, understanding—my above reply to you. I was pointing out how wrong you were in your statement: “There was no technology that was developed for the space program.”
You did not demonstrate that the technology was developed specifically for NASA, all you pointed out was that NASA was the first to deploy.
The same technology was being developed by private firms in order to make multi-user super computers.
Remember, the claim is that none of these things would have existed without NASA, not that NASA did them a few months before anyone else.
Again, no. Your specific claims were:
1) “There was no technology that was developed for the space program.”, and
2) “With the exception of the rocket engines themselves, absolutely everything used by Apollo was already in development in the private sector.”
I do take note of your use of the phrase “absolutely everything” in (2) above. Charming.
Can you tell me what private sector, over the period of the Apollo flights, was developing high-vacuum spacesuits (not pressure suits) and for what non-NASA purpose?
Once again, just because NASA may or may not have been the first to deploy, is not evidence that the technology was developed specifically for NASA.
Everyone of the software techniques you mentioned above are needed for a mainframe to become multi-user. Mainframes already existed and the manufacturers of them were working on multi-user technologies.
I stand by my initial claim.
Yes. We got transistors from the Apollo missions. Absent the desperate need to miniaturize, vacuum tubes worked fine. I’m sure we would have developed them eventually anyway, but if you want to consider return on investment then you need to consider opportunity cost. How much would we have lost if the computer revolution started say 10 years later?
The transistor was invented invented in 1948, so no, we didn’t get the transistor from NASA.
RCA built the first prototype transistor radio in 1952. Once again, long before NASA.
The computer industry eagerly adopted transistors as the were faster, used way less power, and were also way more reliable than the tubes that they replaced.
There was no “desperate need” to miniaturize, however miniaturization made devices of all kinds lighter and more reliable, something all manufacturers, all over the world were eager for.
“The Apollo flight computer was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs).”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Once again, so what?
The fact remains that everyone else who built computers was also working on the same thing at the same time.
That NASA could take an attitude that costs don’t matter is not proof that nobody else was working on the same thing.
While it had less computing power than the average home appliance today, the AGC was the ancestor of fly-by-wire, among other applications.
http://www.klabs.org/history/history_docs/reports/dfbw_tomayko.pdf
For me, however, the big deal remains the moon rocks.
As you say, the technology was there, but your timeline is proof that there was no pressing need to put it into use. Space flight was the killer app. There absolutely was was a desperate need to miniaturize to be able to get that stuff into orbit. The rest of the world really didn’t care.
If the circuits inside a car, or whatever, could suddenly be half as small, it really didn’t matter, but over time the benefits became clear. It probably would have happened, eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. Opportunity cost.
The same sort of thing is true with each of the world wars and aviation.
The rest of the world did care.
Smaller meant less power drain, so batteries lasted longer.
Smaller meant faster, so computers could crunch numbers faster.
As to your example of cars. Do you honestly believe car makers didn’t care how big or heavy the components that went into cars were? Size and weight has always been a concern for them.
It was even more important to the guys who were building airplanes.
At most, NASA advanced these kinds of technologies by a few months.
First miniature transistor radio: 1957.
Before Sputnik 1 even, I think.
I agree. There was a lot of issues that needed to be solved in order to make the moon trip possible. Those innovations have greatly benefited our nation and the world. We created them, we built most of it. Technical challenges always have a long term benefit to a nation.
My biggest complaint/regret with the space program, is we did not capitalize on the developments. Many devices and gizmos developed for NASA were the first, or first of their kind, they should have been patented, then licensed to manufacturers! I made this point way back during the space shuttle program, maybe even early on in it: The cargo capacity of each launch should have been auctioned. Submit a bid stating minimum dimension each way, total volume, and mass, and a $ value it was worth to whatever private entity wanted that space. A computer could have racked ’em and stacked ’em to deliver the best return to NASA for each launch. Instead, NASA just gave it away!!! I swear, there should have been a business manger for NASA long ago!!!
You mean that banning airplanes and cows, while paying people not to work, aren’t brilliant ideas?
Running planes on cow’s farts ?
I guess we could turn methane into kerosene or avgas, using solar and wind power.
But burning C12H26 produces a lot of CO2 and H2O, ie the feedstock plants use to make sugar.
Who wants to be the first to undergo a 3 hour surgery in a hospital that only uses wind and solar for energy?
Don’t be silly … hospitals will be retrofitted with bicycle-powered backup generators. At any given time there will be a fleet of 1,000 bicycles powered by 1,000 Central American “Refugees” pedaling the bikes that Americans just won’t pedal.
Word to the wise:
Hamsters!
‘Nuff said.
Hamster futures are UP!
Wait… I suspect Big Hamster Wheel is behind this. Somebody needs to investigate the Hamster Wheel lobby.
The CA congressional delegation are more into gerbils. And rats.
Shhhhh…. If you don’t let on about the emergency diesel generators in the basement, I won’t either.
If we end the use of fossil fuels those backup generators won’t run. That is a win-win for the greenies that wish to eliminate the surplus population of this country.
I wonder if AOC thinks hospitals should have a bunch of PV panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries in the basement? Hospitals of the future will have lots of roof area once architects realize there won’t be power for elevators.
SR
Hospitals are another place I want to insert a rant! Do you know how much of each day any given operating room sits vacant? There’s some slush fund in Medicare legislation or somewhere that pays hospitals to build operating rooms!!! (and maybe hospital rooms, too, I can’t be sure of that). If a hospital is allowed to function entirely as a for-profit entity, and they get paid by the hard-earned wages of the customer, then there would be an O.R. schedule 24/7. And it would be filled!!! Think about it, if you’re spending your own money, and the surgeon says his hospital has an opening at 10:00 a.m. Thursday 7 weeks out at $X, or at 1:00 a.m. the day after tomorrow for price $0.5X, and it’s your back that’s hurting, do you think he’d have any problem booking the 1:00 a.m. timeslot? And every surgery practice would have 2 partners (at least), one would work the day shift and one would work the night shift. Come on, people!!! O.R.s sitting vacant 80% of the time is an outright waste!!!
Who is the guy signing up for 4:00 AM surgery?
The real scandal is how much time tens of millions of cars spend just sitting in garages and driveways NOT EVEN BEING USED!
I mean come on…can we really not just have one or two cars per city block and just share?
Or why has no one come up with a rent-your-car-out-while-you-eat-and-sleep app for iPhone and Android?
But at least she has secured the key fear of flying, chemtrails, vegan and slacker votes.
Gary Larson was the author of “The Far Side”. He often featured cows in his newspaper offerings.
Perhaps AOC never realized that “The Far Side” was a comic strip and not a desired destination?
Eating beef and cookng with butter and cheese are now acts of political rebellion, I guess.
In an insane world, every logical thought and rational action is an act of madness.
“They are offering all good things, promising that it won’t cost the public a dime. ”
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
-Earth, a crowdfunded by Vogon researchers hazardous experience on the effects of contamination by mutating socialism.
Come on. We are not that clueless. Of course the public will pay and pay and pay and pay ….
Spending Trillions on wind and sun gathering will double/triple our electrical power rates, bankrupt electrical utilities (requiring public bailouts), and result in brown-outs (See Germany and Australia for the first experiments).
Higher power rates will make US industry less competitive. Less high paying blue collar jobs.
And when it ends (money to waste on green schemes that do not work and there is an absolute hard limit to the scheme which Germany has reached), the phoney ‘green’ subsidized jobs will disappear.
Personally, I don’t think ANYONE’s going to pay for this. Except the Democrats, when they lose in 2020. Bigly. Most Americans don’t have any kind of a problem with fossil fuels, and why do you think a skeptical book is No. 1 on Amazon right now under “climatology?” This cat’s out of the bag, folks, and the more time these candidates waste beclowning themselves with this the more thoroughly they self-discredit. Any fool with a 7th-grade education can debunk most of it with a few hours on the ‘net, and most people trust their own eyes. Right here, the ocean is still in the same place it was in my great-grandparents’ time, and we still get 4 seasons, but a lot more wildlife. Tell me “everything’s terrible” and the weather is a “crisis” and I’ll tell you you’re full of sh*t!
Never underestimate the desire for Free Stuff on the part of Democrat voters. A very large proportion of them only care about the Free Stuff today and couldn’t care less that it means an economic collapse tomorrow.
Besides, electoral fraud. The Democrats can print as many votes as they want in states they control.
Which is why the Democrats are so eager to get rid of the Electoral College.
It finally be a jump the shark moment. How can any politician now assert ‘dangerous climate change’ without being questioned about the need to get rid of cow farts. (followed by laughter).
AOC may well have done the world a favor, by highlighting the silliness of the CAGW belief system.
The dreaded bovine flatulence threat of the 2020s!
What about increased human flatulence from replacing beef and dairy products with textured soy products, miso and tofu?
Right on, John T, ……. replacing fish, beef and dairy products with heaping servings of “green growing biomass” salads for every meal will cause a 20X increased in human flatulence that will overpower the dreaded bovine flatulence.
Is this equation correct in an AOC world of renewables and recyclables:
“green growing biomass” = Soylent Green = people
?
I’d like to blame all my mental and physical problems on having to consume 1951-style soy “milk” rather than mother’s milk as a suckling infant, but that’s a bit of a stretch:
Hmmmm….The only way to eliminate cow farts is to slaughter all the cows.
Is PeTA backing AOC and various Dem’s “Green Raw Deal”?
I mean, since we only have 12 years (again) there’s no time to “phase out” factory farming. We have to “murder” cows and all the other domesticated animals NOW!! … before we’re reduced to eating each other!
(Raw Soylent Green. Yum.)
OTOH, methane from hog waste lagoons could open a new front in the war on coal:
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900044200/from-pig-poo-to-power-for-you-new-joint-venture-will-convert-methane-into-renewable-energy.html
If we can’t yet totally decarbonize, at least we can increase the hydrogen to carbon ratio, as with natural gas, ie methane, as opposed to wood, coal and oil. Although of course more CO2 is better, up to about three times the present level of plant food in the air.
Yes, PETA claims cows will thank us if we kill and eat every last one of them.
All at once, instead of spread out, like we do now.
I can’t wait to take the first high speed wood fired steam train to Hawaii. No nukes, no fossil fuels that leaves wood and dung.
This is the world’s longest floating bridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridge
It’s short by about 2335 miles from the required San Francisco to Big Island bridge.
When was the last time a hurricane or typhoon travel across Lake Washington ?
Dunno if we’ve had one since 1962, but well do I recall the Big Blow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962
The first Evergreen Point Floating Bridge opened in 1963.
While not a cyclone, a storm in December did spawn a tornado west of Seattle, across Puget Sound.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/storm-spawned-tornado-washington-state-now-moving-eastern/story?id=59903884
Seems as though “floating” bridges (it’s supported on hollow pilings) are massively expensive … and the original bridge sank (floated?) about a foot lower over time.
http://www.520history.org/1956-Present/EvergreenPtBridge.htm
Sounds like a PERFECT idea in the head of a sadly naive little girl.
To be as fair as possible to the young Socialist, Rep. Ocasio (D., the Bronx) only mentioned intercontinental bridges to replace aircraft, not bridges to remote oceanic islands.
For travel there, we’d need to revert to windjammers, with solar panels for electricity.
And also to be fair to her, do those other Hawaiian Political Nuts realize AOC wants to almost completely end tourism to those islands?
(I suppose there are some that might find sailing to the isles an adventure … for the first few days.)
Not to mention how many people are in a position to take a 5 to 6 week vacation.
Mark,
At 12 knots, the 2400 miles means 200 hours, for round trip of 400 hours, or 17 days. But no doubt the GND will provide for three weeks of paid vacation rather than two.
So you get four days in Hawaii. The trip is most of the vacation. You get the lei and kiss, then three nights later, the same again. Good thing that “Aloha!” means both hello and goodbye.
But forget about a European vacation until you retire.
The longest span of the bridge between North America and Europe would be the 285 statute miles from Iceland to the Faroes. Baffin Island to Greenland and Faroes to Scotland are almost as far. Greenland to Iceland a bit less.
Weather would be a challenge in the North Atlantic. But for the South America to Africa bridge across the tropical Atlantic, sheer distance is daunting. Ascension Island lies about 1000 miles from Africa and 1400 miles from Brazil.
They’re daft. Stark raving. Yet taken seriously, which is even crazier.
OTOH, any change that keeps Masie Hirono at sea and on a train for as long as possible is a good thing.
Maybe best to just jump across the strait from South America to Antarctica, make a quick zip over the ice, then the jump from there to Africa.
Tourism at the North Pole is hurting these days, and they could use a boost.
There will be a charging station on the Farallon islands … 30mi from the Golden Gate. After that … the solar panel “sail” array on the rooftop of your eco-vehicle will carry you the remainder of 2k+ miles.
Oh! And be forewarned ! Even though your dashboard-wide heads-up display showed NOAA’s prediction of clear weather ahead … Pacific Ocean weather can change in an instant … you may need to pull-over, let the storms pass, wait for the sun to recharge your solar panels and then move on. Elon Musk said this is a good time to read a book. Think of it as a primary part of your vacation.
When I returned to Connecticut after being stationed in Hawaii (MCAS Kaneohe), I had my car shipped to LA and drove it across country. I still had the Hawaii plates on it. People would ask how I got my car to CT from Hawaii. I always told them I took the tunnel. Amazing how many people believed it.
Try that drive in an electric car.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company could build a tunnel.
I’d like to see the ventilation for a 2355 mile tunnel.
I believe the acronym is … SCUBA
Or fusion. What’re they going to gin up for a crisis THEN? 😉
With further global cooling, even HI could lose its winter luster:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-storms-store-snow-socked-pacific-northwest-091732280.html
The islands are just barely in the tropics, and there’s nothing between them and the WX factory of the Gulf of Alaska.
What scares me is that there are lots of people who will believe this tripe, and the organizational skills by the left in getting out their vote via social media (aka Obama era) could see something foolish like this implemented if worst came to worst and the democrats actually win in 2020.
The only hope is to educate people well in advance that there is no crisis that requires such a response. However, a lot of these millennials who want all the free stuff that comes with the other parts of the deal unrelated to climate will have their ears shut to any rationale thought on actual climate science.
“YUP”, ……. those “FREE” Obama Cell phones was a ”vote getter” like no other.
It seems to me the underlying theology of the new green deal is the reduction of the human species on an industrial scale.
Well and thoughtfully put. Since the launch event for GND reaction across media has fallen largely along expected ideological lines. Pro-climate alarmism outlets focus on the carbon reduction aspects while less alarmist outlets focus on the economics.
The best political analysis focuses on cow farts, no airplanes, and government checks to those unwilling to work.
Truly a gift from heaven. 2019 America is a far cry from the wobbly Wiemar Republic.
Anti-dairy advocate Alex Ocasio favors oat and cashew milk, but ate ice cream on live (or delayed) TV:
https://www.livekindly.co/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-liberal-drinks-oats/
Milk comes from animals. Oat, cashew, almond and any other plant “milk” is really plant juice with a bunch of thickeners added. But you can’t sell plant juice (h/t Lewis Black).
Read the label, set a better table.
I should have out “milk” in quotes. But purveyors of vegetable colloidal suspension beverages have gotten away with calling their products that.
Put.
I occasionally find soya one in my household fridge, don’t call it ‘milk’, but klim (milk in reverse) as an allusion on the word ‘klima’ = climate in number of European languages.
Udderly ridiculous to call nonmammalian derived protein and sugar colloidal suspensions “milk”!
Larry,
Kudos for trying to keep the politics out of it… Although it clearly was impossible to do so. The Green New Deal is 100% ideologically driven.
Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health calls it “The Dr. Oz Of Environmental Policy”…
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-its-dr-oz-environmental-policy-13795
More like the Oprah of environmental policy. Look under your seats, citizens … and find a New Utopian Dream where everything is “clean”, “Free”, and we all hold hands with the woodland animals and sing happy songs to our Goddess Gaia!
The whole thing is such a ridiculous manifesto that I think it will self-implode. Ridicule is a powerful weapon against such garbage.
Anything beyond ridicule … gives credence to AOC’s NGD stupidity. I knew our collective public education system was failing horribly, but it has also morphed into a Maoist incubator of cultural self-hate. We are DOOMED if these twits can out-vote the well-educated among us.
Of course we (America) is DOOMED, ……. the “social pendulum” has done swung too far to “the left” ….. and there is now at least 3 generations of past and present students that can not possibly be “renutured” (reeducated).
“We are DOOMED if these twits can out-vote the more intelligent and aware among us.”
Fixed it for you. The original version suggests more “education” makes for better decision making, when if you consider what passes for “education” now, being more “indoctrination” than it is “education,” I would suggest, sadly, that the reverse is more likely true (the more “educated,” the more likely to be one of the “twits” than not).
Staying away from school may become the new “well educated”.
Emphasis on the “well” part.
The one shining program of the original New Deal was the Civilian Conservation Corp. Run by the military it took unemployed, young, unmarried men and put them to work improving forest lands for public use. It was conservation of natural resources, not blind “environmentalism.” Recruits were paid $30 a month, of which $25 was sent home to help families during the Depression. They were trained and educated (many had few skills and little schooling) during hours when not doing manual labor. Camp newspapers written, illustrated, and published by the recruits are an example of those personal improvement efforts. After it’s ten-year run when the economy improved and it no longer was needed, Congress stopped the funding and the program withered away, although it never was officially closed. The whole enterprise was purposefully designed to improve the situation using the inherent strengths of family, personal achievement, and organization to get through a severely difficult economic time.
Contrast that with the New Green Deal that wants to pay people unwilling to work, that has no objective for improving individual lives, and doesn’t know or understand history.
“After it’s ten-year run when the economy improved and it no longer was needed, ”
Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941. After that young men were drafted and sent to the Army.
Gary: After it’s ten-year run when the economy improved and it no longer was needed, Congress stopped the funding and the program withered away, although it never was officially closed
Not true. The program was never authorized as a permanent agency and thus ended when congress ended the funding for it – Operations were formally concluded at the end of the federal fiscal year on June 30, 1942
Walter Sobchak : Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941. After that young men were drafted and sent to the Army.
Indeed, once the war started, the government had other uses for those young military aged men.
Additionally, the former CCC facilities were then repurposed – Some as Civilian Public Service camps where conscientious objectors performed “work of national importance” as an alternative to military service, others were used to hold Japanese, German and Italian Americans interned under the Enemy Alien Control Program.
Kumer used to be more objective in his articles on AGW. Now he seems to have gone 100% skeptic. This is just one article on the negative impacts of coal – a fossil fuel that the Moron Trump is trying to revive: https://mol.im/a/6690595
What’s the big deal? Trump doesn’t believe in runaway global warming so it looks like I’m good ’till 2024. How about you?
Please supply a link to such an article. Your link is for Brexit.
Apologies. This is the one: https://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/2019/02/11/a-toxic-crisis-in-americas-coal-country-bbc-news/
And once again, he links to his own site.
Does he succeed to show that he is not a moron?
Meanwhile the US leads in reducing CO2 output without even trying to do that, and countries which have tripled energy prices and spent a gajillion dollars on windmills are emitting more than ever.
Nice work greenies.
We can tell you mean none of what you say because you are also eliminating nuclear.
You story has grown most tiresome Ivan.
And keep talking about our President like that…but come over here and say it to a patriots face.
Buttmunch!
Wow. I guess Eva Braun had kids after all.
Only climate morons such as yourself believe that coal is bad.
Since there isn’t a shred of evidence that CO2 is bad for us, 100% skeptical is the only logical position.
I find Larry Kumer to be logical in his presented arguments, except for the basis of his whole website: Global Warming™ is a problem, and it is caused by CO₂, most especially that produced by the burning of fossil fuels, thus Anthropogenic Global Warming is a problem. So, three false assumptions resulting in three unverifiable correlations, that result in a faulty conclusion.
The ‘Green Bad Dream’
seems like a junior high
school level pipe dream,
from a C average student !
.
Perhaps a student in Iran,
whose goal was to destroy
the US economy ?
.
The Green Bad Dream
has three HUGE problems:
.
(1)
THERE IS NO
CO2 PROBLEM
THAT NEEDS
TO BE SOLVED !
.
.
(2)
CO2 EMISSIONS
WILL RISE FASTER,
and THEN CONTINUE
TO RISE !
.
.
(3)
THE GREEN BAD DREAM
IS NOT FEASIBLE !
.
.
My full article here:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Thanks, Larry. As always, your post was well done.
Regards,
Bob
Robert: With all due respect, I don’t think the Kumar article was all that forth coming or straight forward about the financial and human costs and the immense social tragedies of central government social engineering plans that occurred during the 20th C or preceding eras. The two examples Kumar chose were not apt in any way: the $20 billion spent on the NASA space program likely included the Mercury, Gemini as well as the Apollo missions. Even if adjusted for inflation, say we triple the expenditures due to inflation and the devaluation of the dollar, the cost estimates of any one of the various proposals described in the GND will dwarf the amount spent on Apollo by some multiple. Just take the idea of shutting down all fossil fuel electrical power plants in 10 years; just the depreciation and rapid write off of 10% of these long lived assets per year will cost the shareholders and communities that depend on them more than Apollo. Cost Estimates must include the time and capital to replace these plants with renewable alternatives and fossil fuel back up. He also asserts that Apollo had no benefits, which reminds me of all the nonsense about the Cost/Benefit estimates of fossil fuels: heavy on the social costs the externalities , heavily discounted into the future, but no benefits. Kumar jumps from the costs and benefits of Apollo NASA space mission to the ancient Athenian invasion of Syracuse, a military disaster that weakened the city state and made it vulnerable to the coalition led by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. What a crock! This is a classic example of misdirection from the innumerable “High Modernist” Social catastrophes of the 20th Century engineered by Marxist-Leninist and other governments described in great historical, political, and scientific detail by James Scott in his book Seeing Like A State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. 1998. Yale University Press. From modern Forrestry management in Germany and California, to Robert Moses’ and Le Corbusier’s City planning disasters in NYC and Brazilia to the Stalist Kulak farming collectivization programs in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s to the forced Marxist villagization programs of otherwise productive farming families in Tanzania and Ethiopia in the 1970’s that led to both social disruption of hundreds of thousands of family farms, widespread famines and ecological disasters, there was no shortage of possible examples Kumar could have employed to make a series of salient points about past High Modernist social engineering catastrophes in the 20th C alone. But he chose not to; either he’s ill educated on the subject or he wishes to deflect legitimate well documented criticism of the horrible effects of socialist/ Marxist/ Communist central government planning on everyday people’s lives in multiple countries, cultures, and economies. The history he leaves out without comment is far more revealing and important than what he describes. It reminds me somewhat of the Sherlock Holmes story of the Dog that Didn’t Bark. Well these are the historical references that “cry to heaven” that are silenced.
If I remember it correctly many economists, with the benefit of hindsight, agree that Herbert’s New Deal has been a disaster for the economy, prolonging the Depression by several years. I know, it’s yet another consensus, they could very well be wrong. However it suggests that one should be careful with yet another New Deal, green or not.
The New Deal was first and foremost a power grab by the most power-mad man to ever sit in the Oval Office, and that’s saying a lot. We are still worse off for his folly generations later. Dependence, redistribution and vote-buying never serve people well, despite the protestations of the vote-buyers.
The reason to call the Same Old Red Deal “socialism” is because it is socialism, and socialism kills.
Elected 4 times is a “grab” – the only ones who were annoyed were the Bankers Plot to remove FDR. USMC General Smedley-Butler blew the whistle on the attempted coup, with as usual NYT running cover.
FDR split the banks with Glass-Steagall and we will do it again.
Any reference to USMC General Smedley-Butler gets a +1000, no matter what else you say.
No hyphen. His name was Smedley Darlington Butler. Given name Smedley. Surname Butler. Named for his mom’s dad, a GOP Congressman from PA.
When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Peter. (And bonbon)
The people supported the man who was giving them free stuff.
What’s surprising about that?
The alleged conspiracy was called the Business Plot, not Bankers’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Attempting to “nationali…uh, sociali….uh, take over”* the electricity generation industry is one lawless power grab of many that could be mentioned in the dark legacy of Frankly Delusional Roosevelt.
*per Maxine Waters
He had to destroy the village in order to save it.
In fact, studying the historical records reveals the “New Deal” handouts went, not to the poorest states or even states with the highest unemployment that you might think would need them, not at all, because those states were already solidly Democrat, they were sure to give him their electoral votes in the next election. The vast majority of the money went to the battleground states, the ones he might have won by a slim majority, or lost by the slimmest of margins. It couldn’t be clearer, the “New Deal” was blatant vote buying!!!
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in arts and the middle schools with 7th and 8th graders. Already highly indoctrinated and with no memory of China prior to the Communist takeover their response to his call to fight the reemerging bourgeois tendencies of their teachers was enthusiastic. Once underway the movement quickly spread to high schools and universities.
Having radicalized the kids he turned them on his foes in the party. Any of this sound familiar.
This is a key point. Today on BBC radio I heard about a School Strike planned for Friday to draw attention to climate change and call for action (unspecified). The 17 year old promoting this wanted all schoolchildren from 5 years upwards to walk out and go on demonstrations (she expected the parents of primary school children to accompany them but was otherwise uninterested in the safeguarding aspects. ) She was quite articulate although she referred mistakenly to the English Parliament (there isn’t one, unfortunately.)
Afterwards, my (retired teacher) wife and I discussed where this nonsense could come from. I doubt whether any British 17 year old has seriously studied climatology, so it arises from what parents and schoolteachers (the latter under a degree of government pressure in the UK) have taught them. There you have it. An entire generation is being taught a simplistic view of climatology and possible action (if any) to alter or mitigate changes, which would not be recognised by any serious climate scientists apart from a handful of noisy activists. Many will not possess sufficient understanding of scientific method, interpretation, confidence limits or error, to take anything resembling a critical view, but this won’t stop them campaigning, or indeed becoming media science correspondents.
Something you’ll never see…
Teacher: “Hey kids, you want to skip school on Friday for [insert any reason]? You won’t have to make it up.
Kids: “NO WAY! We want to stay in school all day! Especially on Friday. Can we attend classes on Saturday as well?”
This article uses a lot of history to conclude that the relentless action in politics has reached “Ending Action”.
It has become a “political bubble” at the bursting point.
The popular uprising that arose in 2016 can lead to another Great Reformation.
I’m optimistic that the experiment in authoritarian government is failing and soon will be widely seen as a dreadful failure.
http://canadafreepress.com/article/reckless-mania-of-today's-socialist#Comments
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for
Walescow farts ?What’s the big deal? Trump doesn’t believe in runaway AGW, so it looks like I’m good ’till 2024.
Did I understand you correctly? That we (the government) should now (during Trump’s economic boom) be paying-for the $21T “stimulus” paid to Bankers (Bush), and Government entities (Obama)? And that $21T in spending was a “good thing” for our economy? Bush’s “too big to fail” New Deal, and Obama’s “Save Government Jobs” New Deal were nothing less than THEFT. And I find your reverence for FDR’s New Deal to be … disturbing. Many economic analyses have been made of the New Deal, and most agree that the New Deal actually DEEPENED the Depression and delayed market recovery. If not for America’s entry into WWII, the Depression could have lingered for another decade.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409
OK … I won’t simply hurl invectives at the so-called “Progressives” by calling you all a bunch of “Communists”, “Socialists”, “Marxists”, or “Fascists” … I’ll simply refer to you all as sadly deluded Keynesian Economists. Regardless of the label, you believe that printing $$ to pay people to “do stuff” is the road to economic prosperity. Nonsense. And even WORSE, is the She-Guevara NGD … which follows the “broken windows” model of Keynesian economics … DESTROY our fossil fuel industry … and rebuild it with the “Green” fuel economy. Hint: that will not create Wealth for our nation … or ultimately wealth for any citizen. Only the politburo elites will do well.
[Your restraint (from hurling invectives) is noted and appreciated. -mod]
“Keynesian economist” … the worst of all invectives *wink* I’m incorrigible
I was floored by his claim that Keynes’s plan to run up surpluses in good times in order to run deficits during bad times has been used successfully by governments many times.
Please, please, please, tell me a single instance of governments putting money away during good times. Just one, that’s all I ask.
In reality, government run deficits in good times, and even bigger deficits in bad times.
The mythical pot of unused money that Keynes wanted the government to seize, never existed.
” If not for America’s entry into WWII, the Depression could have lingered for another decade.”
The depression actually did run right through WWII. Military service should not be counted as employment, nor should weapons of war (ships, tanks, artillery, etc.) be counted toward the GDP for the same reason breaking windows does nothing for the economy. America did not enjoy the benefits of all that production.
Proof of my point is that America was still in depression for 2 years after war ended. It takes about 2 years after conditions become positive for our economy to recover from a severe setback.
What ended the Great Depression was America becoming the worlds only surviving manufacturing economy.
Note: Recovering from the Great Depression took over two years because high taxes combined with a spending stimulus does not have a positive effect on an economy. The Obama stimulus package had the same recovery-delaying effect on the great recession as FDR’s New Deal had for the Great Depression.
a panoply of Leftist dreams
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
(Applying the AOC factor, the answer is in fact 5)
“I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
— William Buckley on “Meet the Press”, 17 October 1965.
=============
That’s the first time I have seen that. The same analogy would also apply to many of those who seek public office with a liberal agenda. At least there is some hope that the phone directory selection would produce some with rational and analytical thinking rather than a popularity contest.
Citizens! This socialist plot is NOT about eliminating cows, rebuilding buildings or eliminating the use of fossil fuels. IT’S ABOUT TAXES!! AND THEIR ONGOING PLAN TO TURN THE USA INTO A SOCIALIST COUNTRY! THEY KNOW it is never going to happen. (Well, maybe AOC doesn’t.) Which is why we should NOT be trying to shoot down this boondoggle with its economic infeasibility. It is a plan to massively TAX the life (and freedom) out of Americans. You got a car that runs on CO2 producing fuel, yearly tax of 50% of its value. You got a building that doesn’t meet THEIR environmental “code”, yearly tax of 40% of its value. You want to go from one side of the country to the other in a fossil fuel burning plane, 50 cent per mile tax on your ticket. You got cows/cattle, $25/head/month tax. Etc., etc., etc.
And the proof of what I’m saying is- THEY KNOW TO DO WHAT THEY PROPOSE WOULD REQUIRE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF FOSSIL FUEL AND THE PRODUCTION OF MORE CO2 THEN IT WOULD SAVE!! Review all of the reports/studies we have had here that show MORE CO2 is produced over the lifetime of “renewable” items/processes than their fossil fuel counterparts. THAT is this boondoggles weakest point. Certainly, THEY know that and when brought to everyone’s attention they will say, then we have to TAX (penalize) people for the error of their ways. IT’S WHAT SOCIALISTS DO! Never forget, money is a commodity. And in some people’s heads, so is FREEDOM!
@Milwaukee Bob
They also know that to implement such a plan would require dissolution of our republic and replacing it with an authoritarian form of government.
Somebody BLEW it. Why the heck didn’t this come out in the middle of July with HEAT WAVES & WILDFIRES rampant???
BTW, hi GUS. Love ya.
====================
And let me once again remind everyone, it will make no discernible difference!!! Fighting WWII, the interstate highway system, just to employ a few of AOC’s favorite strawmans (strawmen?) actually did something, we got a return!!! The Green Leap Forward would do nothing with respect to the future climate of this planet!!! This just reinforces my point made on another thread, at this point doing nothing is the only prudent course of action, so that we can have the resources to adapt to any future warming should it occur!!! (which I seriously doubt).
Why should skeptics not believe that CAGW is infected with overwrought scaremongering?
– used by socialists to advance a socialist agenda,
– used by rent-seekers to advance subsidies and infrastructure spending,
– used by do-gooders to advance wealth transfers,
– used by anti-capitalists to handicap industry,
Such is absolutely the case. The existence of the New Green Deal document proves at least half this list, and there is plenty of evidence for the rest.
Those who have sincere fears seem to be happy for the assist, but by failing to call out the invalid reasons, their case for action becomes tainted by them.
Ooops.
Had the link wrong.
For the bursting “Socialist Bubble”:
http://canadafreepress.com/article/reckless-mania-of-todays-socialists
Dreams metastasizing into nightmares.
Paving the road to hell right in front of us.
Follow the Green Fascist Road.
Follow the Green Fascist Road … Follow the Green Fascist Road … As sung by the mental munchkins …
Never let a good (modeled) crisis go to waste.
Incredible using AOC’s crazy scheme to fo after FDR, or is that in fact the actual game?
Could it be WallStreet and London are terrified as the next crash looms Glass-Steagall will finally finish them off?
Trump campaigned on Glass-Steagall as well. Another “Lehmann” he will not find funny.
AOC mentioned Glass-Steagall in her campaign – looks like coopted. Bernie also mentioned it.
The sheer irrationality of all this does indicate the crash is immanent.
There’s a few billionaire’s that are doing their best to make it happen.
‘Blue Horseshoe HATES Donald Trump.”
No reason to bring in the Indianapolis Colts into the discussion!
😛
Good thinking, bonbon. If the crash is immanent, then it’s probably imminent.
One crazy destructive scheme deserves another.
When ever you see the words ‘for the good of the people/planet ‘ that is a good time to get worried for it amazing how often those words have been used before events that are far from ‘good’ and which ‘people ‘ in no way want.
In this case the green deal is in no way possible without a very high level of control of people’s daily lives and clearly there must be some form of ‘punishment ‘for breaking them if you going to have rules in the first place.
Way another thinks a ‘green dictatorship ‘ with a high level of control and the ‘desire ‘ to punish , is going to be better than dictatorship that have come before it with the same the ‘for the good of the people ‘ claims , is an interesting question.
If it really is so good for people, there would be no need to force it on them.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” – Ronald Reagan
The New Green Delusion is just a warmed over manifestation of the Socialist Delusion.
A proper critical analysis of the so called “Green New Deal” would examine the actual wording that expresses the reasoning behind the congressional bill, found here:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text
Each “whereas” clause states a reason why the bill is necessary. Each “whereas” clause puts forth a statement as a statement of unquestionable fact. Each “whereas”, therefore, could be read as “given the fact that”.
Every fact stated in this bill is highly questionable or demonstrably false.
Why would an article on critical analysis avoid this? The article makes no direct, clear mention of the most glaring criticism of all — the false foundation of facts on which the bill is constructed — itemized, one-by-one.
The Green New Deal attempts to stop the greening of the planet, disguised as a progressive agenda.
Socialists were hardly qualifying as green.
When Socialism took over the East Europe the environment and ‘green’ policies were ‘galactic nebulae’ as far as they were concerned. Concrete jungle cities, dirty heavy industries belching all sorts of chemicals in the air and rivers were order of the day.
Are Greens socialists? No, Greens are naive disciples of Nirvana.
“But it has received little critical analysis (other than calling it “socialism”).”
Well running head first into a brick wall doesn’t get much critical analysis beyond calling it stupid.
+100
+1e40. Sorry about the unnaturalness of my vote. But you caught it, stupid enough an idea is not really worth giving some analysis.
perhaps : running with an empty head first into a brick wall
otherwise +1.
But it’s in Congress, and this puts the stupidity within the realm of reality, … admittedly unabashedly stupid, but, once it gets there, the stupid voters who elected the people who got the bill sponsored need the pretense of critical analysis, at least, to formally show how really stupid it is.
Here’s the sort of thing I have in mind:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z6stprwilo3hp0w/GreenNewDealANALYSIS.pdf
Increasing debt has never, ever, increased economic performance.
What happens is government borrowing crowds out private borrowing. Since private borrowing is productive and government borrowing is destructive, increasing debt is always a drag on the economy.
Debt is a very useful lubricant, just don’t drown in it.
Not to be too concerned, in the past the governments always printed more, no need for presses any longer, just few clicks on the ‘red’ keyboard problem solved.
This is NOT one single sentence in the New Green Deal explaining how the actions in the New Green Deal would help the environment in any way. All these actions are suppose to save the planet. Yet, there is no explanation how these actions will save the planet. In fact, there is nothing remotely related to science in the entire document. Most of it is nonsense that will have zero effect on the environment.
And people wonder how it happened that we are in so much trouble. Our education system, such as it is, has totally failed a big piece of American society.
Why not promise to end price supports for dairy products? That would reduce government waste, reduce transfer payments to large ag corporations, and reduce the size of the national dairy herd in one fell swoop.
If Democrats can’t make THAT happen, then we can trust that they are also unable to implement their New Deal. It will be implemented as a collection of financial favors handed out to vested interests who return financial favors back to themselves.
Big changes already:
http://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/In%20Focus/IF00060.pdf
But Gillibrand wants to inflate them again:
https://dailygazette.com/article/2018/03/13/gillibrand-proposes-new-milk-price-support
A lot of the push to reduce the use of dairy products and beef consumption comes from the emphasis on methane emissions. But the impact of methane emissions will make no measurable difference to climate using the information of the IPCC studies. Over the last decade atmospheric CH4 concentration has increased about 7 ppbv per year. Adjusting for the GWP of 28 for methane and molecular weights of CO2 and CH4, 7 ppbv CH4 has the impact of 70 ppbv (0.07 ppmv) of CO2. It will take over 30 years of increases in methane to equal one year of the average increase of CO2 in the last decade, about 2.25 ppmv. With a transient climate response (TCR) of 2.0 C per doubling of CO2 that equals 0.016 C temperature change in 30 years, all else being equal.
National debt is only a bad thing when in complaint mode and commenting from the outside (of power) looking in. It flips the other every few years which is a big reason the number keeps going up.
They started with Smoot-Hawley and kept on digging.
Thomas Sowell wrote:
The “massive unemployment” didn’t happen until the politicians decided to “do something”. The New Deal was about as successful as Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Just wondering, has anyone modeled the historic impact of American Bison on climate in the 1840-1890 range. Does the slaughter show up in the climate record?
Yes. Loss of so much methane generation on the hoof coincided with the end of the LIA.
Oops!
Not supposed to work like that.
“The need for immediate action forced use of unconventional and untested methods. The unused economic capacity of America, both plant and people, meant that even fantastically large fiscal and monetary stimulus (larger than any in the 1930s) would cause no inflation. Of course, Americans did not know that in 1932. The first thorough explanation was published in 1936: Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It was a gamble, done by an alliance of progressives and populists. We won.”
No you lost. They used a crisis to create BIG government .
The Socialist Insanity of a Green Utopia
Peter Schiff
https://youtu.be/b-s6Nr1-R-w
Rex Murphy just posted a response to the GND in Canada’s National Post. I appreciate his writing.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/murphy-beware-the-green-new-trojan-horse-of-the-progressive-social-justice-warriors
Larry Kummer writes:
The use of questions in headlines to arouse irrational fears is the basis of Betteridge’s Law:
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
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That’s the first time I’ve ever seen Betteridge’s Law. I came to a similar conclusion independently many years ago. I always answer the question posed by a headline and most often (I’m not sure it reaches the point that it’s a Law, but close enough) the answer is “no,” particularly if they are arguing for a “yes” in the accompanying article.
Thanks, Larry.
Whilst the diode was invented by Thomas Edison who did not know what to do with it, De Forest added the third element and it became a tride , the glass version. But about 1960 Scientists at Bell Telephone invented the solid state devices, first the diode then added the third element and it became the transistor. This was long before Moon trips and then landings.
R e the nonsense about no Moon landings, Radio telescopes in both the UK and Australia also tracked the trip from the Earth to the Moon and back again, so there was no fake.
MJE
It is Anno Domini 2019 … and we hold the entire knowledge of mankind throughout all history in the palm of our hand which magically takes pictures with as much clarity as Technicolor analogue film. We can chat with anyone across the entire globe …
… and there are ACTUALLY adult humans who believe the the moon landing was faked? Here’s a hint: National Enquirer stories about Alien babies are as “truthful” as a “faked” moon landing. OTOH … National Enquirer photos of Bozo’s junk are as REAL as his midlife crisis.
The so-called GND is the reductio ad absurdum of the takeover of “environmentalism” by communists, noted by Patrick Moore, the only Greenpeace co-founder with a scientific education. Now the watermelons are showing their true colors.
Well I looked but saw no reference to the influential scare stories about Saddam’s phoney weapons on mass destruction that engendered a war with 80% of misled Americans supporting it tooth and nail. The media was sure friendly then to the Republican agenda. Does that war count as a trillion dollar fossil fuel subsidy? Hey you decide but try not to let political bias get in the way of your accounting.
Win the public with the following:
1) Showcase positive results from the industrial revolution, like increased lifespan.
3) Celebrate the strength of human accomplishments. (medical, economics, food transportation …)
4) Inspire people to imagine a future where we actually do control the climate. (no more glacials)
5) Mention the GND as little as possible, attempt to kill it by starvation, and mock it with few words.
In the meantime, I call it the Greenhorn Deal because you have to be a simpleton or hayseed to fall for it.
Hayseeds would be the first to see through the scheme.
The mark of a “well educated” product of our public education system,is the ability to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast.(Douglas Adams)
To be one of the enlightened progressive ones,you have to believe these nonsenses all day and night too.
I will believe the concerned ones and give a polite hearing of their concerns,when they start living the life they keep insisting we must adopt.
Gang Green are fools and bandits,”Do as we say,ignore what we do” is their motto.
And they seem to effect civic society in the same way gaseous gangrene destroys the human body.
But when you advocate for a system that defies human nature,you be sure to test drive it first,we need a reservation for the Cult of Calamitous Climate,were they can show us doubters how the new Green Society will function.
Of course I am completely baffled as to how they will create all the gadgets they depend on,using zero fossil fuels and zero carbon..How these things might be powered is another of lifes mysteries…
I guess a magical world view is easy,especially if you have no knowledge nor skill in building or maintaining systems.
Saddam Huseine was a nasty piece of work, but as Bush senior realised Saddam did keep order in Iraq. A bit like Hitler, he did do some good things such as women getting a education. Keep your nose out of politics and you could live a good life, again just like Hitler s Germany in the 1930 tees.
But he did a terrible thing. The UK and USA oil interests used to control things in Iraq, but Saddam nationalised the oil. Big mistake.
MJE
Businesses were falling like dominoes. Germany showed what might happen here: in the 1930 election the Nazi Party got 18% of the votes, the Communist Party got 13%. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor (FDR took office in March).
und errichtete sein Regime auf Basis der Anordnung des “Ausnahmezustands” den er bis zum Ende seines 3.Reichs nie aufhob:
and established his regime on the basis of the order of “state of emergency” which he never abolished until the end of his 3rd Reich.
I figured out the Green New Dealers “business model.” It makes what they say a lot clearer (and even crazier):
The Green New Dealers want 100 trillion dollars!
http://www.cfact.org/2019/02/12/the-green-new-dealers-want-100-trillion-dollars/
The beginning: “People keep asking what the Green New Deal will cost, but that is the wrong question. The question is how much do they want? It turns out the New Dealers are pretty clear about the answer around $100 trillion over ten years. They are working to a very big budget. What gets done depends on the money, not vice versa.
Representative Ocasio-Cortez (who has a degree in economics) and her crew have a clear idea of where the money for the Green New Deal is going to come from and roughly how much they want. As with WW2, the Green New Deal will simply consume about half of American GDP. I am not making this up. That WW2 was a time of great sacrifice and hardship, as a direct result of this dramatic mobilization, does not matter to these folks. War is war, right?
Here it is in its clearest form: “The resolution describes the 10-year plan to transform every sector of our economy to remove GHH and pollution. It says it does this through huge investment in renewables at WW2 scale (which was 40-60% GDP investments).” This recent quote is from Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti.
If you start with a budget of 40-60% of US GDP you can think really big, and the Green New Dealers have done just that. GDP is running around $20 trillion a year, or $200 trillion in ten years. Taking 40-60% of that is $80-120 trillion, so let’s call it an even $100 trillion to finance the Green New Deal dream.
The ways and means of raising this stupendous sum of $100 trillion are also clear in their minds. It will be done the same way WW2 was done, however that was. It is obvious to them that we can do this, because we have done it before. The specifics do not matter to the Plan. The Government can work them out.”
There is a lot more in the article.
Let’s ask the 70+ House and Senate co-sponsors of the Green New Deal Resolution if they endorse this $100 trillion goal. I bet not, for most of them.
But it has received little critical analysis (other than calling it “socialism”).
And, by that score, it still hasn’t. A lot of words went into this article, but little to no *actual analysis* of what’s in the New Green Deal. Lots of generalities and arm waving but no attempt to critically go through the list of items in the NGD one-by-one, heck no single item in the NGD is even specifically called out. Just a discussion of what Apollo and FDR’s new deal worth the cost and a bit of arm waving about “leftist dreams’ (without calling any of them out by name). When I read the line:
But it has received little critical analysis (other than calling it “socialism”).
I expected something substantive that would dig in and actually critically analysis what’s in the NGD. I was greatly disappointed.
It [The original New Deal] was a gamble, done by an alliance of progressives and populists. We won.
That’s highly debatable. There’s a well agreed school of thought that the New Deal actually made things worse by deepening and lengthening the Depression, in which case that’s hardly a “win”. But the history lesson, as flawed and one sided as it was, isn’t any kind of analysis of the NGD.
You are correct, John Endicott. Larry Kummer starts out calling his piece “analytical” not political. But by the end it is exactly political. And you are definitely correct about the original New Deal, which I think can be considered a massive failure, and the cause of the Great Recession of 1937, from which the country may not have recovered for a long time if it had not been for World War II creating demand for American goods and services. Even so, as Amity Schlaes and others have pointed out, the country did not even get back to some of the economic numbers it had achieved during the Roaring 20s until the late 1950s (the Dow Jones index did not get back to the position it was in the day before the Crash of October 1929 until around 1955).
But there is one thing about Kummer’s piece at the end that I think is useful about getting to the heart of the matter. The panic being created by AOC, Bernie Sanders, our old friend Bill McKibben, and others of AOC’s ideological ilk is generated for one reason and one reason only: the achievement of power and control at the expense of our form of constitutional government. It is ALL that the Green New Deal is about. Remaking society in this social engineering and economic “justice” (whatever that really is, it is all fluff at this point) in a way eerily familiar to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (and the Nazis were BIG environmentalists). Which is why I call what they propose “reactionary.” It harkens us back to an earlier era of Communism, of economic deprivation, of attempts to equalize all of us through redistribution of wealth through banning airplanes and cows, retrofitting buildings that in the end will only end up being demolished in the style of Pol Pot, and a whole host of restrictions on the personal lives and liberties of individuals. Which is what ideological people such as AOC want to do when they achieve power and control.
When I look At AOC, it still doesn’t register in my mind what it stands for. I wish people would just spell it out first Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) before they go on and on about AOC….
Just sayin…
I thought it must be some global warming term…I hate acronyms…
I use AOC to avoid spelling it out because when I spell it out, I can’t help but be petty and use “Occasional Cortex”, “Occasionally Coherent”, “Ocrazio Cortex” or some other corruption of her name to reflect how nuts she is.
The notion of powering the modern world with renewables is analogous to the notion of powering Boeing 787’s with canvas sails.
“Advocates often point to the many workers not in the labor force. … there are not that many of them.”
If you don’t understand economics, you shouldn’t use it in your arguments as it devalues your whole perspective. If you go back to FRED, you’ll find the Participation Rate (not what you chose to put up). That chart would have shown that during Obama, the Participation Rate fell 4-5% – that’s 6 or 7 million Americans. And the rate has barely budged since then.
Rather than say that those people are retired or disabled, you should understand that with ObamaCare’s heavy hand, many people took two orthreepart time jobs, and so they are double and triple counted in the job statistics. If anything, the Participation Rate is understated.
As for skills, a lot of that is made up for with on the job training. And yes, there is a lot of missing skills to make up for.
There is enough to show that the GND is nuts without shouting stuff you don’t understand.