Christian, Conservative, Pro-Western Civilization,Pro-Original Intent Constitution, Pro-Life, Pro Family, Pro 2nd Ammendment, Pro Smaller Government, Pro Control of Borders, Pro Control of Deep / Administrative State, Pro At Least 2 viable political parties ...
In short, a very bad person in BOistan today, fondly remembering America!
The simple answer is that the sun never shines at night and some days it is cloudy, the wind also sometimes doesn't blow. News at 11.
So, in general utilities have to have 120% of their highest peak in capacity ... and against this, wind and solar can account for about 20% ... no matter how much wind and solar you have available.
So when it gets cold and it isn't windy ...
Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.
So the greenies want to stop building pipelines, and they want to not have coal or nuclear provide power.
What they have been telling us since the '90s is that it isn't going to get cold anymore ... at least not "record cold", or the "subzero temps of old" here in the upper midwest. Hey! We are in a new warmer climate zone now! Back in 2012 they were telling us that we were going to have to start worrying about termites, because "sub-zero nights were a thing of the past" in the Twin Cities.
Otherwise ... well, no issue with 58 National Empergencies since the concept was created in 1976, 31 of them still active. All sorts of directed foreign policy against certain countries / dictators, property, funds, moves against cyber crime, etc ... a laundry list.
The wall? Even the 25 billion is basically chump change. The US Postal Service which is supposed to be solvent lost $5.5 billion in one year, the F-35 fighter, $29 billion a year, in 2013 Medicare made $45.7 billion in "improper payments".
A one time investment of $6, $16 or $26 billion to save a MINIUM of $54 billion a year is a damned good investment! Nobody knows how many illegals we have -- that is the point of "illegal", it is ALL estimates. Conservatives are going to estimate high, liberals are going to estimate low -- AND, they are going to value the contributions of illegals very highly.
Unless we have controlled borders, we will never know!
My preference would be to repeal the National Emergency law -- it is definitely a sign that the executive and legislative branches are unable to govern using the checks and balances that were intended to be used. Has it been, will it be misused? Absolutely -- it's a government law, it HAS BEEN, IS, and WILL BE misused! What part of the reason for smaller more accountable government are you missing?
That said however, the reality is that we DO have it AND the government has been broken for a very long time ... at least since Watergate. We have a royal unaccountable Administrative State that actually calls the shots. That Administrative State **OUGHT** to be under direct control of the executive branch ... it is an active function like the military. Congress is like the Board of Directors ... they control funding and they can pass laws to modify how the Administrative State functions -- but the President out to be able to hire, fire, furlough, etc like any other executive -- and as FDR realized, government employees should NEVER be unionized!
The current situtation is completely simple. "The Party" (TP-D) which controls the Administrative State, the media, most of the professions including law and judgeships, wants open borders to allow "undocumented democrats" to come in as voters and be included in the census (this is why they are fighting to avoid even having a question asking if the person is a citizen on the census!) to add to the already extreme power of TP.
TP is for open borders and against voter ID. Does it really get any simpler than that!
Even beyond the service sector, more and more white-collar workers are having their time invaded by emails, Slack messages, and other work responsibilities. A generalized law restricting the ability of nonessential businesses from functioning one day a week would go a long way to protect workers from the creeping commodification of every second of their time. Put bluntly, it would make sense to legally interdict the ability of your boss to expect you to respond to an email on Sunday morning.
"Creeping" or "crept"? For knowledge workers, it is more the rule than the exception to be available 24x7 by text, phone, etc when your boss / customers / clients / etc "need you".
I was always struck when I went to England or Germany on business how difficult it was to purchase ANYTHING ( gifts for back home, food, office supplies" after "5" or on Sunday.
It turns out that the Sabbath was made for man ... (Mark 2:27) "Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."" VOX seems to have figured this out all on their own! Apparently man does not live by "bread" alone (as the hippies called MONEY) while modern man has been converted into pure econoimic man ... a "consumer" rather than a "citizen", let alone a PERSON. Perhaps even the left is beginning to see glimmers of the obvious fault in making humans one dimensional!
So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.
Ah "the facts" ... you know, "statistics say", "studies say". I found this excerpt to be prophetic;
Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls' parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.
The "invisible hand" of amoral evolution, whose only possible morality is exactly the same as the "morality" of Science ... "what works", "might is right", "the fittest survive". Science provides "the facts" ... it sets up the experiments or studies and Science decides what are "legitimate questions". "Truth" is a "repeatable experiment".
Strange though, the article was written in 1997 and the scientific minded author assumed that tribalism was "long gone"! Yet, in less than 20 years, BOistan has moved back to being a completely tribal state. The Governor of Virginia agreed with the 1997 article from the left one week, then an old picture of him was found wearing blackface a week later. The R tribe is very angry about killing babies. The D tribe is fine with baby killing, however the blackface was enough to momentarily label him an R before they went back to their usual practice of just not putting a party label on a badly behaving D (CNN)!
What would the "Scientific Facts" say about the morality of wearing blackface in 1984? See "the facts" don't support any sanctions against infanticide, so we ought not have them. What does Science tell us about wearing blackface, supposedly in a Michael Jackson dance contest? Does the fact that Michael Jackson attempted to LIGHTEN his complexion and enjoyed having sleepovers with underage kids affect the "morality"?
What one would think would be completely obvious at this point is that tribalism is a natural behavior of humans, and the largest single thing that allowed us to rise above it was religion, with the grand champion religion being Christianity, one of the foundations of Western civilization. Some of us older people are still vaguely aware of Western civilization, and I know, ULTRA amazing, are still believing practicing Christians!
As late as the late '90s, one would have to have journeyed to Borneo, Paupa New Guinea, or the deep jungles of the Amazon to observe humans in their natural tribal state. Now we can watch congresswomen dress all in white and synchronize their actions like native women in the jungle on live national TV as they assume that they are doing something that the rest of their tribe will be impressed by!
Without transcendence, usually provided to the masses by religion, humans operate in the way their genes tell them to. "Education" about "facts" does nothing with emotions, and as even science is increasingly aware, our "reason" is largely used to explain our emotions. We are rationalizing rather than reational creatures.
Infanticide, genocide, slavery, the use of might to vanquish and even exterminate the weak -- all are exemplary of homo sapiens in our natural state, and Civilization / Culture was the UNnatural "cultivation" that allowed us to be more than "natural humans". We gave that up though ... so we could more like the "very flower of humanity" as Star Trek explored in "Mirror, Mirror".
"The Hill" is left-center bias -- about as good as one gets in major outlets in BOistan these days ... NPR is about the same.
The article provides a good scorecard of the DOCUMENTED Clinton / DNC involvement with Russia both before and during the 2016 campaign, including millions of $$ going to the "Clinton Fund" (funds ... for Clintons!). This is their summary:
There is clear evidence now that shows Hillary Clinton’s family and charity profited from Moscow and simultaneously facilitated official government actions benefiting Russia that have raised security concerns.
And there’s irrefutable evidence that her opposition research effort on Trump — one that inspired an FBI probe — was carried out by people who got information from Russia and were consorting with Russians.
It would seem those questions deserve at least some of the scrutiny afforded the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry that is now two-plus years old.
"It would seem" ... well, yes, in a nation not ruled by a single party by virtue of the entire Administrative / Deep State being in the hands of "The Party" (TP-D).
Unfortunately, we don't live in that state, but rather in BOistan, where anyone not a D that is elected is saddled with being "under investigation" the entire time they were in office -- a policy of TP that started with Watergate, moved to Iran Contra under Reagan AND HW Bush, and continued with "Valerie Plame", 911, and other investigations of W Bush.
Once we went from being "One Nation, Under God" to being "A Tribal Mess, Under TP", articles like this OCCASIONALLY get written from the State controlled media, but they are virtually unknown.
They are part of the fig leaf that lets the sheeple claim we have a "democracy".
This PL post does a good job of debunking the whole "teens in MAGA hats "mocked" Native American" headline calumny, He came up to them, started beating a drum in their face, and they stood their ground.
I guess a buddy and I "mocked" a bunch of union thugs attempting to block entrance to a Newt Gingerich talk in Rochester in the mid-90's as we walked through their picket line and they decided that avoiding physical contact was the better part of "valor". They had no business blocking the entrance -- protesting, YES!, with my support, but do not seek to intimidate!
The MSM used to be horribly biased in what they picked as stories and how they reported them -- but they used to stick to things that were at least somewhat "news" -- actual leadership/political actors, famous, well known, wealthy were involved ... "public people". Not a completely NOT NEWS case of demonstrators attempting to intimidate KIDS and the kids doing NOTHING!
Just think if they reported every time some young "psuedo-toughs" of any race walked down sidewalks forcing other people to get out of their way? I imagine that is how I'll first find out I'm old -- when one of them fails to move out of my way (the norm), or one keeps coming at me as I walk on the right side and they eventually don't bounce off.
Perhaps we could just stick to when youth of any race disrespect their elders -- old veterans in uniform, the Flag, etc. -- oh wait, I guess disrespecting the Flag is now "truth to power", my bad.
The MSM used to just be embarrassingly one sided -- now it is the enemy of the people, even the kids.
If those of us who look at this trash and fail to speak up keep doing so, we deserve what we get -- it won't be old indians with drums doing the intimidating then -- it will be the modern version of the Hitler Youth or the Soviet "Young Pioneers" pushing and kicking us when we are too old to do anything about it.
Bad stuff comes on slowly -- day by day, drip by drip. We ignore it at our peril.
One of the stories I try to follow because the MSM barely takes notice is the yearly meeting at Davos Switzerland of the 3,000 or so wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. Even the MSM admits that it is "more than a thousand" private jets. Naturally, since our true ruling class -- the Davos elite, is under no circumstances going to give up flying, we are regularly told that "flying doesn't matter much" for the supposed scourge of Global Warming -- which is sort of like saying "where you dump sewage doesn't matter much" (if it is YOUR yard, or the intake to YOUR cities water supply, does location matter?).
... if we focus just on the impact over the next five years, then planes currently account for more global warming than all the cars on the world's roads – a stark reversal of the usual comparison. Per passenger mile, things are even more marked: flying turns out to be on average 50 times worse than driving in terms of a five-year warming impact.
Of course "50x" would be for travelling on commercial jets, where the cost is spread over a couple hundred people. As anyone knows from driving, speed costs a lot -- and the private jets go as fast as they can because their owners are REALLY important! -- just ask them. The best way to go fast is to go high, which is of course a worse place to dump your carbon. let's just say that each of those global elites are doing as much carbon damage as 50x200 driving 20k miles or so (there and back)! So like 10,000 people driving 20k miles x 1,500 or so (jets) -- eg, the carbon footprint of 150,000 people driving 20k miles a year spent on just one trip for our oh so concerned about the warming "crisis" elites!
It was a sub zero weekend here in Iowa flyover country USA. We spent a good portion of the weekend taking part in a fishing tournament with 150 other folks, nary a bit of evidence of a "crisis" of any sort in sight. Current outside temp, -9 degrees.
If you want to waste a little time of just how screwed up our "values" are -- remember this.
