Politics and science, humor and hypocrisy. METANOODLE
David Strom writing at Hot Air: "Were elections always clean, in the hisotry of the universe, elections would be the first thing of immense value that nobody tried to steal".
He brings this up in the context of a possibel re-do of the Harris County TX election over deliberate selective shorting of ballot paper.
Professor Victor David Hansen nails this succinctly:
The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them. ...... The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked.
What's the big picture? I see chaotic flows, polycentric, consuming energy and information. The BBC documentaries and Earth and Ocean make it clear that most obvious animals are busy eating one another. They are consuming weakly-defended surpluses.
Trying to make sense of world politics is like trying to understand a grass fire by interviewing clumps of grass. The fuel is there. The fire is burning. When the fuel is consumed or out of reach, the fire stops.
The digital revolution, spreading information at the speed of light, is a big fire and is feeding on everything in all the cultures and faiths and governments of the world.
Inflation isn't a mystery. Milton Friedman:
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It’s always and everywhere, a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. Moreover, in the modern era, the important next step is to recognize that today, governments control the quantity of money. So that as a result, inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.
If you listen to people in Washington talk, they will tell you that inflation is produced by greedy businessmen or it’s produced by grasping unions or it’s produced by spendthrift consumers, or maybe, it’s those terrible Arab Sheikhs who are producing it. Now, of course, businessmen are greedy. Who of us isn’t? Trade unions are grasping. Who of us isn’t? And there’s no doubt that the consumer is a spendthrift. At least every man knows that about his wife.
But none of them produce inflation for the very simple reason that neither the businessman, nor the trade union, nor the housewife has a printing press in their basement on which they can turn out those green pieces of paper we call money.
Making sense of things is a favourite pass-time and it's doomed to be in error.
The "truth of the matter" when determined by one brilliant person, is still an authoritarian solution that leaves out what millions of others believe in some cases and think in other cases. It's like a state controlled economy instead of a market with price signals that determine what happens next.
"Sense" is subsidiary to reality and I believe much of reality doesn't make sense in human terms and never will. Where were you when the lights were out and you fell asleep and later when "you" dreamed? What's the story about dark matter and energy - which has never been pinned down - being the major component of the gravitational universe. And so on.
A key quote from Greenpeace's new report, "Plastic Recycling is a Dead-End-Street" linked from City Journal. "An admirably succinct disagnosis"
“Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.”
City Journal adds:
Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
Forget the conspiracy theories: Russia, US, Ukraine. They don't add up. (Update below) This report from Lawdog files, a guy with gas pipeline experience, ticks all the explanation boxes. As he says, "When anuything involving energy-industry hydrocarbons explodes...well sabotage isn't the first thing that comes to mind. And honestly, when it comes to a pipeline running natural gas under Russian (non)mantenance, an explosion means that it's Tuesday. Or Friday. Or another day of the week ending in "y".
Until I read his article, I was clueless about the actual baked-in dangers of a natural gas pipeline which we knew was in need of servicing. We just assumed the servicing was 100% head-fake by Russia to bug the West.
In summary: The Nordstrom pipelines were idle and and methane hydrates could be triggered to form and some would form into plugs. Only very slow decompression over weeks from both ends of the pipe would safely lower the pressure for maintenance. Local efforts to heat and remelt the plug are catastrophically dangerous. Lowering the pressure from one end of the pipe is has a small chance of working but is likely to cause the plug to break loose at about 200 kmph. The "diesel effect" on impact at a curvature in the pipe will then generate a flash. 17 hours separated the explosions. We know there have been maintenance issues and that Russia (think Chernobyl) has a poor track record here. We know the lines were idle and cooling. Nobody is claiming responsibility for one of the most expensive industrial wrecks ever. You can watch his video clip to see how the diesel effect works, producing ignition under impact pressure. h/t Instapundit.
Click the link to Instapundit above, not the jpg below.
Also, October 1st an update from LawDog showing the ruptures happened at angles in the pipes.
The killer chart uses a baseline of average weekly deaths by cancer. In the past, it's been occasionally a little below, occasionally a little above the baseline until late 2021 when deaths exploded
after the Covid mRNA injections began.
He notes that the CDC has recoded cause-of-death since June 2 2022.
CDC "disappeared" about half the SADS deaths into other categories but was less able to juggle the cancer deaths.
