George Rebane
The general circulation models (GCMs) still aren’t worth a crap. For most of us able to read the literature, that fact has been known for well over a decade. And looking at how GCM errors have remained large and unchanged, the models haven’t gotten any better. But that makes no never mind to leftwing scientists hewing to the A21 objectives through their participation in the UN’s IPCC policy driving fiasco. Now some really pocketbook numbing results are coming in to back up these conclusions – the nation’s high-tech solar plants are failing to deliver. As an example, “a $2.2B project in California (see filched photo below) generates just 40% of its expected electricity.” Why? Well, when they ran the numbers during their design and construction phases, the GCMs predicted much less cloud cover during the lifetime of the plants – had to, remember less cloud cover leads to a warmer earth, and they had to dick with the model parameters to produce catastrophic global warming. Problem was, when they drank that kool-aid in putting something in place like big expensive solar farms, they used the same hokey GCMs, and now the industry has its collective tit in a wringer. Not only is operation and maintenance of all those thousands of mirrors and photovoltaics a bitch, they ain’t getting the sunshine promised by the expert climate ‘scientists’ (more here). In the meantime central planners are hyping the hysteria for the next global warming conference this fall.
Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, has been a bastion of classical liberal education. Early in the Great Society years it began weaning itself from accepting even a vestige of federal and state monies, not even allowing its students to avail themselves to such government support. As a result it has maintained its standards and survived to become an internationally respected institution of liberal arts that teaches the classics and an unadulterated version of the US Constitution. 2.9M people worldwide receive Imprimis, its publication of excellent and evocative speeches given on campus. It also fields online courses. Its admission policy is colorblind, and it does not keep any politically correct metrics on its students. It has no relationship with the Department of Education, and suffers from no government control. Now, as you might expect, all these factors are enough to piss off Washington bureaucrats until their eyes are crossed. As a consequence, the bastards have started working hard to find ways to bring Hillsdale to heel into the tightly controlled corral that used to be our system of higher education where freedom of speech, thought, and ideas were the currency of exchange among students and their professors. The avenue now being pursued against Hillsdale is to corrupt the accreditation process administered by a group of agencies which today require colleges to supply all kinds of data having nothing to do with how well they turn out educated American adults who probably will not vote for progressives very much. (more here)
Guaranteed National Income has been a recent topic in these pages (here and here). It is a concept to implement since GNI is the only answer to massive systemic unemployment that may keep blood from our gutters. The Cato Institute has recently published a policy analysis – ‘The Pros and Cons of a Guaranteed National Income’ – in which it dissects our $20T and counting failure to fight poverty over the last 40 years. The document also contains a critical analysis of the various suggested approaches to a GNI, and concludes that there exists no known solution toward which we should revamp our public policies. Instead it soberly recommends that in this environment of unknowns we should proceed incrementally, starting with consolidating most of our 126 separate anti-poverty programs which today send checks to over 110M Americans. This effort had to be started yesterday, and we need politicians in our state houses and Washington who understand more about systemic unemployment than, perhaps, how to spell it.
[16jun15 update] Hillary is now stoking the great Liberal Lie Machine with her massive unfounded screeds about Republicans working tirelessly to deny minorities their voting rights, and the evils and impacts of income inequality. But the big news for us conservatatians is the continuing reports of the Left’s efforts to roll back the First Amendment (among the other constitutional rights they target). We hear from the Capital Research Center that if you “don’t like what your opponents are saying in the public square? Then have them locked up — that’s the apparent philosophy behind a recent broadside by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). In a Washington Post op-ed, the Senator explained that groups who express skepticism about catastrophic global warming are enemies of science, just like the tobacco companies that denied the harms of smoking, and so federal prosecutors should use the RICO law and investigate those groups racketeering. Writing for PhilanthropyDaily.com, CRC senior fellow Martin Morse Wooster rebuts Whitehouse’s hare-brained idea to criminalize speech.”
That only the Left attempts to silence free speech has been a long-held thesis of RR. I am still looking for reciprocal behavior from the Right. Can anyone help?
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