ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Completely Fraudulent “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” Francis Menton

Posted By on August 20th, 2022

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=3677406bfa

My last post on Tuesday reported on the Soho Forum climate change debate that had taken place the previous day. Debater Andrew Dessler, arguing in favor of rapid reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions by the method of vastly increasing electricity production from wind and solar generators, had heavily relied on the assertion that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity. An important slide in his presentation showed comparative costs of generation from various sources, with wind and solar clearly shown as least expensive. At the bottom of the slide, the acronym “LCOE” was legible.

LCOE stands for Levelized Cost of Electricity. I first encountered this term a couple of years ago, and thought that I should get on top of it to understand its significance. It took me about a half hour to figure out that this metric was completely inapplicable and invalid for purposes of comparing the costs of using dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generators as the predominant sources to power an electrical grid that works. The reasons are not complicated, but do take some minutes of thought if the matter has not previously been explained to you. In Tuesday’s post, I asked as to Dessler’s reliance on this LCOE metric:

[I]s he aware of this [inapplicability of LCOE] and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively?

Some commenters on the post were quite harsh in their judgments of Dessler. They argued for the inference of intentional deception, on the basis that no one claiming expertise in this field could really be so obtuse as to think LCOE was a valid metric for the purpose for which Dessler was using it.

So today I thought to look at how others go about comparing the costs of generation of electricity from wind and solar versus dispatchable sources like fossil fuels or nuclear. I can’t say that I was surprised to learn that LCOE is everywhere as the metric of choice for the comparison. Moreover, it is almost impossible to find any discussion of why LCOE is completely misleading when comparing the cost of a grid powered predominantly by dispatchable sources to the cost of a grid powered predominantly by intermittent wind and solar sources backed up by storage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why Western Tools of Reason are Useless in Fighting Islamism

Posted By on August 20th, 2022

https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-infidels-will-not-be-silenced/

The infidels will not be silenced Like Salman Rushdie, I choose freedom.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the fatwa with glee.

I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.

In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.

And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Security Threat: China’s Interest in US Agriculture by Judith Bergman

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18790/us-agriculture-china

The more US agricultural technology China acquires, especially through theft, in order to become dominant in the agritech field, the worse the US will fare when it comes to selling its own technology, whether to China or third countries.

The specific goal is for China to be able to satisfy 95% of its demand for agricultural machinery with equipment that is manufactured in China. According to the USCC report, those policies, underpinned in part by technological theft, have negatively affected US exports to China of agricultural equipment….

China has been expanding its ownership of US land over the past decade from 13,720 acres in 2010 to 352,140 acres in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

China’s largest purchase in the US agriculture sector so far has been Smithfield Foods in 2013, the largest pork producer in the US. China’s WH Group — a state-owned company, which began as a meatpacking business in China — owns it today. At the time of the sale, Smithfield had 25 U.S. plants, 460 farms, and contracts with 2,100 producers in 12 states and the ownership of Smithfield accounted for more than 146,000 acres of US land.

“While China’s main interest in obtaining GM seeds from the United States is in improving its crop yields, the potential weaponization of agricultural IP is possible,” the USSC warned. “… Similar to hacking a computer code, Beijing could easily hack the code or DNA of U.S. GM seeds and conduct biowarfare by creating some type of blight that could destroy U.S. crops… a virus or fungus engineered to kill a GM plant could wipe out an entire crop…” — U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Staff Research Report, May 26, 2022.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recently warned that China’s interest in the agriculture of the United States poses both a serious economic challenge and a security risk to the United States.

China sits on 7-9% percent of the world’s arable land, 294 million acres, but is home to nearly 20% (1.4 billion in 2020) of the global population (nearly 8 billion in 2022). By comparison, the US has more than 375 million acres of arable land and a population of 329.5 million.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinians continue to exploit the Holocaust  By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-715068

During a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin on Tuesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was asked by a reporter whether he intended to apologize for the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes at the summer Olympics in Munich.

The question was not only relevant to the upcoming 50th anniversary of the mass murder committed by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September; it was particularly apt, given the fact that Abbas himself was named by the architect of the bloodshed, Mohammed Oudeh (aka Abu Daoud), as one of the three senior Fatah officials who assisted him in orchestrating the attack.

“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas replied to the journalist. “I can list 50 slaughters that Israel committed from 1947 until today; 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian villages… 50 Holocausts.”

The statement was typical. Abbas always alternates between denying the Holocaust – as he did in his 1982 PhD dissertation, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism” – and accusing the Jewish state of committing Nazi-like crimes against the Palestinians.

This time, however, he miscalculated the response that such comments would elicit. Though Scholz merely winced while hearing the Third Reich’s genocide of the Jews invoked on a podium at the German Chancellery – only taking issue with the Palestinian leader’s use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israel – he came out subsequently swinging with a tweet expressing his “disgust” at Abbas’s “outrageous remarks.”

Like numerous figures, far and wide at home and abroad, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid promptly reacted with anger. 

“Mahmoud Abbas accusing Israel of having committed ‘50 Holocausts’ while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace, but a monstrous lie,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive him.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

How Much Of The U.S. Has China Already Infiltrated Right Under Our Noses? By: John Mac Ghlionn

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/18/how-much-of-the-u-s-has-china-already-infiltrated-right-under-our-noses/

Through land grabs, media partners, and spies, the Chinese assault is less of a swift invasion and more of an endless infiltration.

Numerous pieces have been published discussing the inexorable rise of China, and the likelihood of the Chinese economy overtaking the United States’ economy. More concerning, though, is the fact that Chinese companies closely aligned with Beijing are directly influencing operations in the United States. They are buying up land, influencing news and media networks, and shaping the narratives on college campuses. The Chinese assault is less of a swift invasion and more of an endless infiltration.

Land Grabs

Fufeng Group, a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), recently acquired 300 acres of prime farmland in North Dakota for $2.6 million. China now owns well over 192,000 agricultural acres in the United States.

On July 25, obviously concerned by Fufeng’s purchase, Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota asked the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to “provide clarity on whether this land purchase has national security implications.”

Burgum’s fears are most definitely warranted. Over the last decade, Chinese ownership of farmland in the United States has increased dramatically. To compound matters, only a handful of states ban foreign ownership of farmland. Since 2016, a mysterious billionaire by the name of Sun Guangxinhas spent tens of millions of dollars buying land in Texas. Sun’s ties to the CCP are well known. 

In truth, Chinese ownership of American farmland is just one part of the disturbing equation. Residential real estate is the second part. China now accounts for roughly a quarter of total foreign investment, in U.S. residential real estate, according to Market Watch. The Chinese are now the largest foreign buyers of U.S. homes and this has been the case for close to a decade. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shame the FBI or Abuses Will Escalate If the FBI can selectively leak portions of the affidavit agents used to justify the search of Mar-a-Lago, then why should it be allowed to conceal the rest of the affidavit? By Adam Mill

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/18/shame-the-fbi-or-abuses-will-escalate/

I have been unable to locate any condemnation by the FBI of the leaks to the New York Times of the “highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government,” in connection with the Mar-a-Lago raid. That’s strange because only a day earlier the Justice Department told a federal judge that releasing the names of these witnesses would, “jeopardize the integrity of this national security investigation.” The silence is deafening. 

On Monday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition to the release of the affidavit the FBI used to justify its “panty raid” on Mar-a-Lago.“Disclosure at this juncture of the affidavit supporting probable cause would, by contrast, cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation,”  the government argued. “As the Court is aware from its review of the affidavit, it contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government.”

The very next day, within 24 hours, the Times published an article exposing “Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, the White House counsel and his deputy under President Donald J. Trump,” as the very witnesses whose identity the Department of Justice said it wanted to protect. If this were a real investigation, the target would now be warned to be careful talking to these two witnesses. 

The source for the Times article? “Three people familiar with the matter.” It’s conceivable that at the very moment a Justice Department lawyer wrote the warning to the court about revealing witness identities, three of the involved FBI agents were doing just that. 

Of course, there will be no condemnation of the leaks of the identity of these witnesses because it’s part of the FBI’s public relations campaign and election interference strategy. In spite of the FBI constantly seeking secrecy to protect its “sources and methods,” it’s more than happy to leak its sources as one of its very dirty methods. 

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Truth and Post-Truth about Slavery Eugene Alexander Donnini

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/07-08/the-truth-and-post-truth-about-slavery/

EXCERPTS:

Deconstructionism  is selectively used by the Left, not only to silence the scientific community, and any empirical critique of the Left’s ideology and objectives, but to reject the validity of the scientific method. Deconstructionism, has, over several decades, attached itself like a parasite to the syllabi of the Social Sciences and Humanities departments of Western universities, where it has also embraced contemporary Marxist theory, which includes the study of history.

For half a century the postmodern Left have been doing their best to debunk the concept of objective truth wherever it dares to question the validity of their totalitarian ideology. Take, for example, the theory of transgenderism which, like Pascoe’s Dark Emu, is a compendium of touchy-feely, anti-scientific, anti-historical balderdash that asserts that women can have penises and men can give birth. The critics of post-truth are considered cold-hearted reactionaries, to whom facts are more important than feelings.

The post-truth fabrication of history articulated mostly by Marxist literary and social theorists is also at the core of, and what fuels the racism of the neo-fascist Left today—particularly against white people—when it comes to the history, not only of colonialism, but of slavery itself, of which the exploitation of indigenous people was the most prominent part, along with the exploitation of poor white people. Generally speaking, the great bulk of post-truth leftist books on the subject seem to attribute the invention and perpetuation of slavery to white people, and have linked skin colour to a “historical guilt complex”, believing that this generation and future generations of Caucasian people should carry the shame, guilt and burden of the past—of people and institutions they have no connection with whatsoever. In fact, as we shall see, many of their white ancestors were transported to the New World as slaves and indentured servants, or migrated from Europe long after institutionalised slavery in the New World was brought to an end after a moral crusade by white people.

The historical reality of slavery, particularly in the Americas, is very different from the racist rants and accusations against white people perpetrated by post-truth progressive academics and BLM activists, that has now been formulated into the doctrine of Critical Race Theory, which draws on the work of postmodern Marxist Antonio Gramsci: a radical teaching that focuses on race as the key to understanding society, and objectifies people based on race, like Nazi racial doctrine with its hierarchical tribal blood relationships.

But as any empirical study of history will reveal, unequivocally, white people were the least interested in institutionalised slavery, and those who profited from it were not the people per se, but the ruling and aristocratic elites. These historical facts have been suppressed, censored or hidden. So, let’s look at some of the major ones as they relate to the institution of slavery: first, in the United States; second, in South America; and finally, slavery as it exists in the world today.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Suppression of the Truth: The Order of Our Day And the lifeblood of the Left. Matthew Hanley

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/suppressio-veri-order-our-day-matthew-hanley/

In Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s recent, perfectly entitled book: The Truth is No Defense, she recounts how her life as an Austrian woman was turned upside down because she accurately articulated things that Islam deems permissible and virtuous. Including child marriage. As per Mohammed’s example.

For her trouble, she was subject to burdensome litigation that wound its way up to Europe’s highest court. And she lost. Although what she communicated was true – factually correct – the court ruled that expressing some truths may be hurtful, and therefore must be disallowed due to the overriding need to protect the feelings of Muslims.

That Muslim authorities themselves defend child marriage (and other unflattering practices) as something beyond reproach and therefore by definition not hurtful is a massive inconsistency worthy of further exploration another time.

For now, I wish to stress that Suppressio Veri – suppression of the truth – was literally a court order.  Not only because properly functioning courts are specifically meant to venerate the truth and rule against its disregard either by acts of commission or omission. But because it strikes me that, more broadly, Suppressio Veri is quite simply the order of the day – the defining characteristic of our era, along with its correlate Suggestio Falsi – the insinuation of an untruth.

Suppressio Veri most certainly is the lifeblood of the Left. Examples abound so that they can hardly be enumerated. The transgender falsehood is almost too obvious to mention. Yet we have a man named Richard calling himself Rachel serving as the Assistant Secretary for Health for the HHS, and no one bats an eye. Everyone pretends – as if at the point of a sword – that this is real.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Enormous Amounts of Money Flow into the Bottomless Education Pit How much will it really help student achievement? Larry Sand

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/enormous-amounts-money-continue-flow-bottomless-larry-sand/

Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America now spends even more on k-12 education, with an outlay of about $900 billion dollars a year, which includes an additional $122 billion from the Covid-related American Rescue Plan. While we have a military that is second to none, our education spending does not lead to a similar result. Our annual education outlay is second highest in the world, trailing only Norway. But in achievement, we are in the middle of the pack. For example, the 2018 rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has the U.S. 36th out of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, which is given to 15-year-olds.     

So where does all this money go?

Not much for the kids. In fact, Over 80% of it goes to salaries and benefits for teachers and other employees.

Maybe the money will help alleviate the teacher shortage?

Hardly. The teacher shortage writ large is non-existent. Using data from a National Education Association report, Mike Antonucci writes that  there were 48,985,186 students enrolled in the nation’s public school system in 2021, about 256,000 fewer than in 2012. But school districts hired an additional 276,000 instructional staff during the same period. He adds that student enrollment fell 2.4 percent in the U.S. from fall 2019 to fall 2020, falling in every state and the District of Columbia, yet 17 states added teachers.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parent Sues School Over Transgender Brainwashing Proselytizing California groomers are running wild. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on August 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/parent-sues-school-over-transgender-brainwashing-matthew-vadum/

California parent Jessica Konen is suing her local school district for secretly indoctrinating her 6th grade daughter into the cult of transgenderism, convincing her to change her gender identity, all while urging her not to discuss the situation with her mother because she could not be “trusted.”

The behavior of these woke teachers matters not only because parents – as opposed to the government – are supposed to be in charge of raising their own children, but also because transgenderism is a treacherous ideology that threatens the very underpinnings of both our society and Western civilization as a whole.

It is not about homosexuality or bisexuality, which Americans have become increasingly tolerant of in recent years. Many Americans are even supportive of transgender people when they are consenting adults, but they do not support groomers’ efforts to force impressionable children to renounce their birth sex and pretend to be something they are not. The rise of groups such as Gays Against Groomers, whose members are aghast at reports of little kids being forced to attend drag queen performances, shows that plenty of gays recognize it is wrong to push transgender ideology onto children.

It is about totalitarian thought control. The advocates of transgenderism, backed by the Biden-Harris regime, would force Americans to recognize an individual’s professed gender identity even if it doesn’t match the person’s birth sex. Forcing people to say things they know aren’t true is the essence of totalitarianism.