Rebane's Ruminations

Thanksgiving 2021

George Rebane

In spite of it all dear readers and RR regulars, we still have so much to be thankful for.  Jo Ann and I wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving, and may you be blessed to share it with those you love.

Stupidity, against which there is no defense

Fools all who seem it, and half of those who do not.  Gracian #201

George Rebane

Executed anti-Nazi cleric and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer correctly maintained that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”  In America, we overwhelmingly confirm this daily.  Now I admit, sometimes it’s hard to accept this as the better of the two alternatives, but for the most part one can embrace Bonhoeffer’s observation because there are way more stupid people in the country than evil ones.  This has also been a Rebane Doctrine tenet for many years.  (more here)

Democrat politicians and lamestream ‘journalists’ demonstrate this with their audacious and ongoing stream of lies – e.g. the $4T+ BBB cost “will not raise the national debt by one penny.” - they constantly use to convince their cognitively impaired constituents who make up almost half of the country’s voters – without an adequate knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they’ll believe literally anything their favorite information sources spout.

Bonhoeffer went on to say –

Against stupidity we have no defense.  Neither protests nor force can touch it.  Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simple be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can count by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied.  In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive.  For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.

This why so many of today’s conservative and libertarian writers, along with moi, see no common ground across which a trail may be blazed to the unification of our polarized population.  The only solution being a negotiated Great Divide or barricades in the streets.

BLM laments Rittenhouse verdict

George Rebane

Those whose politics have no acceptable future, divert attention only to their version of the past.

National Propaganda Radio this morning featured interviews with BLM leaders who claimed that the Rittenhouse verdict now justified the wanton killing of black protesters by illegally armed and militant white supremacists.  This outrageously false message was repeated by the usual lamestream suspects in a litany of videos shown on FN’s Media Buzz broadcast.  All of it follows an historical year of the mainstream media and leftwing politicians gratuitously libeling Kyle Rittenhouse with allegations that have shown to be pure fabrications by a rogue press continuing their narrative to support critical race theory.

Upon examination, the main complaint of BLM is the fear that the thugs they field under the rubric of ‘peaceful protesters’ will now no longer feel secure when they riot and assault property owners and others they deem to be their class enemies.  The lament is that Rittenhouse has set a precedent that it is now legal for “militant white supremacists” to carry guns on the street and defend themselves when attacked.  A gang of rioters can no longer feel safe and protected by supportive progressive politicians, and the legions of the side-lined and lame law enforcement cadres.  What’s a peaceful protester to do when presented with such a potentially dire scenario?

Led by outlets like NPR, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, …, the public has been told a mountain of lies for over a year about what happened in Kenosha on 25 August 2020.  Humorous personal vignettes now abound about astonished, some outraged, Americans who just now are finding out that race was not an issue in the shootings since only white men were involved, and that it was legal (if not wise) for Rittenhouse to carry a visible long-gun during a riot, and that there was no illegal crossing of state lines with a weapon, and that he had more right to be in town than the imported thugs burning and destroying everything they could lay their hands on.  You pay a high price in ignorance when you limit your news sources to the politically woke and stridently divisive lamestream.

For the rest of us it would be a boon if more law-abiding citizens with concealed carries to protect their cities were on streets empty of police when Antifa and BLM plan their next riots.  No rioters should feel secure when they pick an innocent victim and decide to assault him with the intent of doing great bodily harm or worse.  Nevertheless, that guarantee of safety for the criminal is the demand of every Democrat, most certainly those of national repute.

Postscript – To properly characterize the nature of the Left who now assemble on the streets, and prepare for future protests cum riots, we have last Friday’s Chicago, Portland, and Brooklyn demonstrations led by worthies such as ‘The Reverend’ Jesse Jackson.  At these demonstrations people chanted, “every city, every town, burn your precinct to the ground”, and “the only solution is a communist revolution.” (more here)

Herding CRT's Ideological Cats

‘It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that ain’t so.’  Will Rogers and others.

George Rebane

Herding ideological cats is a job Union editor Alan Riquelmy is tasked with as the chair of the newspaper’s Editorial Board.  On the whole he does a commendable job in composing the EB’s weekly debate into a cohesive Our View column that appears in its Saturday edition.  Today’s topic (here) is a particularly hairy one – Critical Race Theory as taught in our K-12 schools.

The recent public forum on CRT was held at the high school board meeting with most attending being CRT’s ideological devotees, while denying that it is taught to Nevada County kids.  Their opposition was a group calling itself Protecting American Ideals whose members presented evidence that indeed the tenets of CRT are taught in our schools, and that such teachings are destructive to the kids’ learning and practicing American ideals.  As Riquelmy points out, neither side was there “to listen to the presentation”, but instead to “participate in the pageant” of people with made-up minds.  Moreover, our editor reveals that even the EB “couldn’t reach consensus on an issue this contentious”.

As Riquelmy sought to pour oil on the column’s troubled waters, he ran into a couple of items with which I have a nit or two.  First, our editor is of the common understanding that there exists only one history.  Serious students of history are the first to point out that there are countless histories, each of which aims to present a cohesive narrative of a period’s chronicled events.  The job of historians is to identify the causal basins and beams (sequences of ‘this caused that’, etc) of every notable milestone that they explicate.  And as we know, causality is both slippery and many-headed.  To every gathering of causal sequences, one can quickly come up with yet another one that tells a different plausible story of the times.

Another popular error embedded in our society can be laid at the feet of the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan – ‘you can have your own opinion, but you can’t have your own facts.’  Wrong!  It is easy to see in this age of the internet, 500 plus media channels, and facile international communications, that there are many disparate sets of ‘facts’ that attend and characterize any issue or notion.  It is only the voluble talking heads and media pundits who each purvey their own facts as the gospel upon which their narrative finds footing and reflects their biases.  We consumers of history and facts have more than an ample smorgasbord from which to choose what suits our fancy or yields to our grasp.

Finally, CRT does have a widely accepted definition composed of tenets considered to be true.  These are collected and displayed on various websites – e.g. britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory.  The tenets presented generally agree; they are not a mystery.  But here is the meat of the argument about CRT being taught in our schools – ‘Critical Race Theory’ does not have to appear in a school’s syllabus in order to have its tenets be taught to students.  The tenets of any body of thought can be marbled piecemeal into any of a number of different courses to communicate its desired ideological perspective – today there are even handbooks to show teachers how to inject CRT into all STEM(!) subjects.  And that is demonstrably what students tell their parents what is happening, and that is what the parents are up in arms about here in Nevada County and across the country.

Our editor admirably concludes, “Sure, we want our children to learn about history without the politics of the day tainting it. We don’t want our kids saddled with the sins of the past. We want a vibrant new generation to leave school armed with knowledge and critical thinking skills, questioning a country they love when needed and fighting for it when required.”

And then he adds the kicker, “But we also want people who think like us going to the polls.”  It was ever thus.

Scattershots – 18nov21 (updated 19nov21)

George Rebane

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.  Congress has become aware of UAPs reported subrosa for decades, and openly in recent years.  Sen Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is heading up the effort to create an ‘Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office’ to get to the bottom of all these UFO sightings and stories.  Her amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act is co-sponsored by Sens Rubio, Graham, Blunt, and Heinrich. (more here)  Given the Congress’s record of ‘getting to the bottom’ of anything, this new initiative will at least have the opportunity to provide us with some sensational entertainment in the coming months – and then again, maybe not.

Mentality of Congresscritters on Display.  Rep Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was censured by the House for posting a since-deleted video “where he appeared to be attacking Ms Ocasio-Cortez with a sword and was poised to attack Mr Biden.” (here)  While I’m again astounded by such an act, I am no longer surprised because for years (decades?) we have seen our congressional honorables do the dumbest things, always followed by our head-scratching ‘What in hell was s/he thinking?’  And here we go again; what kind of thought process (if any) preceded Gosar’s junior high act of posting such online graffiti?  More importantly, how does someone evincing such mental processes perform at the more usual tasks for which they were elected?

[19nov21 update]  The House passed the $4.6T ‘Build Back Better’ travesty of historical government enlargement and population control, and sent it to the Senate where, if God is kind, it will die an agonizing death.  The legislation is based on the largest bamboozle that the federal government has ever pulled on our ill-informed citizenry.  The 19nov21 WSJ does an excellent job (here) spelling out the atrocities included in what the Democrats are seeking to foist on the nation.  There is not a single item in this pack of lies – including ‘fully paid for’, decrease deficits, and the CBO’s ‘scoring’ - that will not hurt our economy, national security, and people’s growing dependency on wealth transfers.  Its evil objective is to create more compliant takers and limit/control prospects for the nation’s makers. (more here and here)

‘Kyle Rittenhouse acquitted of all charges.’  For at least half the country this is heartening news that our justice system is not uniformly broken.  For the other half, fomented by the lamestream media that volubly prejudged the teenager guilty, this is bad news since it breaks the narrative that self-defense with a gun should be banned across the country, and most certainly in any public forum. (more here and here)

‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’

George Rebane

RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here).  The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles.  Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M.  Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.

As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs.  They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible.  The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.

But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI).  One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check.  This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans.  These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.

RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment.  A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Sandbox – 15nov2

[With today’s signing of the trillion plus ‘infrastructure bill’ the Democrat perfidy is made visible.  The bill contain1s so little (about $100B) for actually fixing roads, bridges, etc that municipalities are not prepared to issue massive new amounts of municipal bonds – usually a jurisdiction’s ‘matching funds’ to garner federal subsidies.  Therefore, the outstanding tax-free municipal bond prices are rising and their yields falling.  The infrastructure bill is yet another Biden travesty that misses the mark as the feds (the Fed) continue printing new money.  So the question stands – name ONE thing that Bumblebrain has done right.  gjr]

Extraterrestrials and Religion

George Rebane

Recently the Ignatius Forum held a session on ‘The Future of Space’ at our National Cathedral attended by theologians, government space officials, private sector space entrepreneurs, and academics.  Among the latter was Prof Avi Loeb of Harvard who is also active in SETI and a member of the international SETI group (of which I am a member) administered by the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

While the larger topic was finding ETs, a more focused topic of interest was how we earthlings bring the existence of ETIs into concordance with our notions of God and religion.  Prof Loeb is not a person of faith, but made it clear that “science and religion are not necessarily in conflict, as long as one is careful not to ignore the boundary between physics and meta-physics. … In finding advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, religion might simply reflect advanced science with a twist. Traditional religions described God as the creator of the Universe and life within it. They also suggested that humans were made in the image of God. But these notions are not necessarily in contradiction with science. A sufficiently advanced scientific civilization might be able to create synthetic life in its laboratories; in fact, some of our terrestrial laboratories almost reached that threshold. And with a good understanding of how to unify quantum-mechanics and gravity, an advanced scientific civilization could potentially create a baby universe in its laboratories. Therefore, an advanced scientific civilization might be a good approximation to God.” (more here with links to the forum)

Long time readers will recognize this as a position much discussed over the years in these pages, especially as it relates to my position as a copernican viz science.  In that, Loeb and many other scientists are kindred spirits.  What impressed me is the Harvard astro-physicist’s stance on the perspective humanity should assume when it considers cosmic matters - these being humility, modesty, and calmness.  In the greater scheme of things we are not important enough about which to make a great fuss.  I have dwelled on the quantitative measures of our ordinary insignificance in my SETI paper (here) among other postings.

In the final analysis of integrating religion, science, and an intelligent creator, I find nothing awkward or contrary in my particular understanding of Christianity as a faith compatible with civilizations across the universe.  It is a particularly comforting belief system to embrace as we seek to understand the Upanishad’s ‘Tat tvam asi!’

Postscript – ‘Who am I?’ is a question often heard from people seeking to find a deeper significance to their existence.  It is the wrong question, and we already know its answer, since ‘who’ seeks to identify one as a particular member of a known set.  ‘Tat tvam asi!’ points to the much deeper question of ‘What am I?’, the question which seeks to know the essence of the set itself.

Scattershots – 10nov21

George Rebane

A lot has been happening in the Rebane clan lately.  This has kept me from posting at my usual rate.  Not only that, but every time I look at the news, I get into a dour mood and get to feeling hopeless again.  One of my current books underway is VDH’s The Dying Citizen (2021) in which he gives an historical overview of citizenry over the ages that shines a light on how our current middle classes have adopted the mantle of serfdom without the slightest inkling of it.  Not only that, but a national dialogue about our society’s state and direction is proscribed today by the Left’s minions in public education, academe, and the media.  The writings of right-leaning pundits like Fred Siegel, Robert Nisbet, Joel Kotkin, and Charles Murray are off limits, and citing their studies, no matter how well documented, is now forbidden in polite leftwing company (as I also recently discovered here).

In the past when I have found myself in such doldrums, the surefire road back has always involved ‘pushing squigglies’ on some new idea or invention.  So I dived into some financial engineering stuff on trading probabilistics of the kind pioneered by Didier Sornette – Why Stock Markets Crash (2003) – and John Casti.  (If you want to see a super-exponential, look at the recent behavior of the Dow, SP500, and Nasdaq.)  Hopefully, this work will lead into some proprietary IP.  But rummaging around with some ideas I discovered a new and handy use of the ‘WoRM formula’ beloved of artillerymen everywhere. (more here and here) It makes possible the extraction of distances and object sizes from photographs, and also allows graphic artists to correctly represent desired distances and sizes in the works they create.  I’ll write up the method so that interested readers can download a pdf of it.

Macdonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinsky stated something pretty obvious to the country’s remaining thinkers about parents having failed their children who were killed in gang warfare and police shootings.  Telling the wrong truth and calling attention to parents of the wrong race can get a well-paid executive fired.  So Kempczinsky did what anybody who puts purse before principle would do, he groveled.  My takeaway is that the poor bastard had not made his ‘go-to-hell’ stash yet, and really needed the job.  (more here and here)

COP26, the ongoing climate conference in Glasgow, has been the kabuki dance that I and most other sober observers predicted.  With leaders of major polluters absent, the rest are left to talk about utter crap like “multi-stakeholder decarbonization initiatives.”  Only people like Team Biden and its halo of flacks pretend to take any of this seriously.  Even Saint Greta of Thunberg dunned the affair as nothing but a “two-week long celebration of business as usual.”

Ruminations – 2nov21 (updated 6nov21)

George Rebane

The puzzle continues.  About three years ago our cities were empty of indigents’ tents lining the streets and freeway underpasses.  What happened?  Where did all these people and their encampments come from?  If the numbers haven’t increased, then where did all of them live?  And if they have increased, what government policies or private sector factors increased their numbers so that now they dominate the downtowns of major cities across the land.  The only common denominator is the that those urban cesspools are and have been under Democrat administrations.

The Big Question still stands about Bumblebrain's accomplishments.  Can anyone name JUST ONE thing that he's done right since he took office?  That now seems to be a question on more minds as we watch the Virginia governor election returns.

[3nov21 update] Liberal Minds on Display #1 – Unless ‘Critical Race Theory’ is explicitly listed in a school’s curriculum, liberals and their lamestream will deny that any such subject matter is taught in that school.  The same goes for so many other hidden and denied leftwing initiatives and activities, such as ‘socialism’, the existence of which is denied in governance unless every facet of its definition is implemented.  They know that the surest (only?) route to successfully introducing their ideology is through subterfuge.

Liberal Minds on Display #2 – What really makes my heart heavy and continues my eternal lament for our beloved country is that our land is full of Double Dummy Districts populated by voters so desperately ignorant that they keep voting for the same Democrat Tammany Hall look-alikes who continue to screw, blue, and tattoo them.  And they don’t have a clue.

Socialist legislation on parade.  The Dems have to hold the ‘reconciliation bill’ hostage to the concurrent passage with the bi-partisan infrastructure bill because they, as all good socialists, know that voting separately on their outrageously priced ‘human infrastructure’ bamboozle would give it a snow ball’s chance in hell of passing.  Their only hope is that their constituencies continue  intellectually dense as ever, so that no one knows what is the real reason for the hold-up.  And can you believe that in light of that, Team Pelosi and Bumblebrain are comfortable to continue the lie that it is the Republicans who hold up passage of the bill to repair our highways, bridges, internet, etc?

[6nov21 update]  A big hit to Virginia voters, and their kindred spirits across the land voting on rolling back everything from CRT, to vaccine mandates, to defunding police departments.  This is but a glimmer of hope on the sanity of the nation’s electorate pulling back from the progressive/communist policies cliff – nevertheless, all such glimmers enjoy a heartfelt welcome.  When the dust settles, we must remember that such one election does not necessarily assure a nation’s future.

Sandbox - 30oct21

[Happy End of Fire Season!  Exit question - what potion should one take to get excited about the World Series this year?  gjr]

Wealth Tax – dodging a bullet

George Rebane

One of the very dumbest things progressive Democrats have recently proposed is a wealth tax on appreciated but unrealized assets.  Everywhere it has been tried by the Left, it has not worked; it has instead reduced government revenues and distorted economies – e.g. Sweden, Germany, and France were posterchildren of such fiscal idiocies. (more here) Today our Democrats, always looking for something to screw up our economy, have attempted to import yet another bad idea as a ‘pay-for’ for their latest lavish vote buying plans.  Hopefully, this tax has been excised from the current version of this double dummy ‘human infrastructure’ bill.

As a student of economics, over the years it has become clear to me that one of the paramount qualifications for becoming a leftwing economist is that you have to be totally ignorant of human nature, especially of their economic behavior.  We won’t even attempt to plumb the depths of intellectual depravity in the Democrats’ assertion that their multi-trillion dollar spending initiatives will be absolutely free – “It will cost zero.”  The real tragedy for the country is that half of Americans accepted this Big Lie, and that the Republicans gave their usual lame response to repudiate it.

My own noodling on the wealth tax involved a niggling thought that the proposed wealth tax rates were not real, that they in effect had to be higher.  So I pushed a few squigglies, and sure enough, the real wealth tax rate is considerably higher than the rates publicized by the Democrats.  It’s a bit amazing that no Republican or even the conservative financial experts have picked up on this additional attribute of the stupid tax.  So here’s the drill as to how this tax will work on, say, an appreciated security you own.

Your nominal wealth tax amount is the wealth tax rate applied to the appreciated amount (since last wealth tax paid).  However, the rub comes when you consider where to get the money to pay the wealth tax.  The correct answer is that investments pay their own taxes, whether capital gains, added assessments, or the wealth tax.  So now you must sell a fraction of your shares, pay the applicable capital gains tax on their appreciation, and then use the remainder to pay your wealth tax.  In short, it’s the value of the fraction of shares you must sell that is your real and effective wealth tax rate.  A little algebra using the appropriate tax and appreciation rates will let us derive that formula and do the calculations.  I share the results of this analysis with you in the spreadsheet figure below (click on it to enlarge).

In the figure the blue numbers are input to create a wealth tax scenario at the indicated values, with the nominal wealth tax rate of 1%.  From the calculations shown in the figure the actual wealth tax rate comes to 1.67%, two thirds higher than the government advertised rate.  And paying this wealth tax annually reduces the investment’s annual appreciation rate from its nominal 7% to 5.33%.  When we examine what the actual wealth tax is over a range of wealth tax rates (from 1% to 3%) and capital gains rates (from 25% to 50%), then we see in the table the increased actual rates that go from 1.33% (a third higher) to 6% (doubled!).  These are plotted in the graph.

It gets worse.  As shown in the upper right of the figure, we have a $1,000 investment currently appreciating at a nominal 7% rate for ten years, then liquidating it with a payment of 40% cap gains rate.  The net spendable amount then comes to $1,580 which yields a total ten-year return of 58.03%.  When we have the same amount with ten years of ‘1%’ wealth tax payments, we wind up with $1,381 or an appreciation of only 38.08% that amounts to a penalty of over 34% on what investors currently enjoy when paying capital gains taxes only on realized gains.  And we haven’t heard any of this from our rightwing media mavens.

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

Ruminations – 27oct21

George Rebane

Record storm total at Casa Rebane measured out at 12.1 inches.  According to The Union this is a regional record for western Nevada County.  We were amazed that the power stayed on while the rain fell almost horizontally.  Home fires were kept burning; we’re blessed with acreage that supplies an ‘infinite’ amount of firewood.

Liberal Minds on Display #1.  Union reader Terry Boyles wants cuts in military spending to help pay for the Democrats’ Debacle of the Trillions.  He argues (here) cuts are justified due to our military’s poor performance, and points out “the fact that our armed forces have achieved little in the way of real national security recently, after a string of failed foreign excursions.”  You think that our political leadership might have had just a tad to do with those failures?

Liberal Minds on Display #2.  “Banning two-stroke engines over time is not a bad thing” opines Phil Carville in a 26oct21 Union ‘Other Voices’.  He cites the air pollution caused by two-strokers as the prime reason for going all electric.  What he and other liberals advocating such a future sooner than later is where does all this reliable electricity come from, and at what cost to both wallet, environment, and economy.  None of these proponents cite the energy losses required to convert one form of energy to another, and the multiple costs and pollution involved in such conversions. 

[Here are some electrical energy conversion scribbles for the curious.  The world’s average fossil fuels net conversion efficiency of 33%, and that is further degraded by transmission and distribution losses of about 9.2% (CA) before it gets to the outlet that charges your battery.  And before your e-mower cuts a blade of grass, its motor works at most with only 80% of the energy that was used to (slow) charge the battery, and at least a 10% further loss in battery storage.  When you put it all together, the energy efficiency of your battery-powered appliance comes down to a generous net of about 20% - I’ve left out some other losses like in your house wiring.  More here, here, and here.]

Liberal Minds on Display #3 – Union letter writer Ron Lowe frequently shares his thoughts with us.  In the 27oct21 Union he is (here) “convinced Republican Party leaders have adopted an authoritarian approach that demands ideological conformity to most any political or scientific posture.  There is no room for independent thinking or freedom of speech allowed.”  Really?!  Now this is exactly what our woke progressives have put in place in government, academe, and the country’s workplaces.  Anyone see the GOP having done any of this?  None of us want to live with the Ron Lowes, and would only want to talk to him about a peaceful separation.  But the Ron Lowes, for some reason, want us to stay.