Quotulatiousness

September 15, 2022

The promise of grand “green” plans versus the reality when the plans are implemented

Elizabeth Nickson on the contrast between how things like the “Green New Deal” are represented by their proponents and the media and what their actual real-world outcomes are like:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Ever wonder what happens to a region once it is “preserved”? Right now, all through the US and Canada, governments are taking giant bites of land, and locking them down under the guidance of the UN’s Agenda 2030, which means a full 30% of the land and waters will be “saved”. If anyone notices, the local media preens and praises itself. Aren’t we all so wonderful and enlightened and caring, the PR says, and the newspapers copy it line-for-line.

No, it’s terrible. It is possibly the very worst thing ever. Set-aside land degrades. There aren’t enough bureaucrats in the world to take care of it. Besides out in the forest or up on the ranges is decidedly not where a civil servant wants to be. As a result none of them know what they have done. It’s a loop, politicians, stupid women and beta males, civil servants engaged in a masturbatory celebration of their goodness and triumph over commerce. From hipster neighborhoods all over North America a song of self-praise rises like smoke into the air.

Except now, right now, I sit in a smoke haze courtesy of the set aside forests in Washington State which are burning. Look, this is simple to think through. In the early 90’s Clinton ratified the spotted owl preservation plan and hundreds of millions of acres of forest were left to themselves, no cutting, no grazing, no firewood collection, no thinning, no fire breaks, no removal of dead trees, especially not beetle-killed trees. In fact, no touch.

What happens when a formerly industrial forest is left to itself? A thousand tiny trees start to grow right up against each other. They grow like carrots that haven’t been thinned. They grow so thick they can’t get light. They draw all the water from the ground, they end up like tinder. Around them brush grows — it too cannot get light or much water so it too is desiccated. It grows up the trees, trying to get at the water in the trees, and acts as a fire ladder

Boom.

Massive canopy fires, which, since they decommissioned the roads into the forest, are very very difficult to either brake or put out.

On every single environmental metric, in every single system, these people destroy the land. What they do is exactly the opposite of what they claim. They take massive amounts of tax money to “save” land and then they destroy the resource. And the towns in the resource area. And the families, and the tax base.

I could go through every environmental goal, and tear it apart. None of them use science that is provable. It can’t be duplicated, its assumptions are wrong, its statistics fiddled. Tens of thousands of papers are used to create these policies, written by the environment movement through its NGOs, funded by rich morons from old families, most of whose ancestors created environmental devastation themselves. I can refute the math and assumptions of EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM given a maximum of four hours and one phone call. No one challenges these studies, and these abominations then become law. Law that destroys the water and land.

Italy Switches Sides in World War Two – WAH 077 – September 11, 1943

World War Two
Published 14 Sep 2022

When Italy leaves WW2, The Nazi German Reich immediately begins occupying the country, and the occupied nations it has held until now.
(more…)

“Presentism is … a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jeff Minick on the mental attitude that animates so many progressives:

My online dictionary defines presentism as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts”. To my surprise, the 40-year-old dictionary on my shelf also contains this eyesore of a word and definition.

To be present, of course, is a generally considered a virtue. It can mean everything from giving ourselves to the job at hand — no one wants a surgeon dreaming of his upcoming vacation to St. Croix while he’s cracking open your chest — to consoling a grieving friend.

But presentism is altogether different. It’s a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu. The latter spreads by way of a virus, the former through ignorance and puffed-up pride.

Presentism is what inspires the afflicted to tear down the statues of such Americans as Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for owning slaves without ever once asking why this was so or seeking to discover what these men thought of slavery. Presentism is why the “Little House Books” and some of the early stories by Dr. Seuss are attacked or banned entirely.

Presentism is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.

Presentism accounts in large measure for our Mount Everest of debt and inflation. Those overseeing our nation’s finances have refused to listen to warnings from the past, even the recent past, about the clear dangers of a government creating trillions of dollars out of the air.

Presentism has led America into overseas adventures that have invariably come to a bad end. Afghanistan, for example, has long been known as the graveyard of empires, a cemetery which includes the tombstones of British and Russian ambitions. By our refusal to heed the lessons of that history and our botched withdrawal from Kabul, we dug our own grave alongside them.

H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.

Lahti L-35: Finland’s First Domestic Service Automatic Pistol

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Apr 2018

When Finland decided to replace the Luger as its service handgun, they turned to Finland’s most famous arms designer, Aimo Lahti. After a few iterations, Lahti devised a short recoil semiautomatic pistol with a vertically traveling locking block, not too different from a Bergmann 1910 or Type 94 Nambu. It was adopted in 1935, but production did not really begin in earnest until 1939 at the VKT rifle factory. Several variations were made as elements of the gun were simplified to speed up production, and the design was also licensed to the Swedish Husqvarna company, which manufactured nearly 10 times as many of the pistols as VKT eventually did.

In today’s video we will look at each of the variations, including one with an original shoulder stock and the early and late military guns as well as the post-war commercial guns marked Valmet instead of VKT.
(more…)

QotD: Protectionism

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Any particular protectionist policy sits somewhere on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is a scheme of protectionism in which government officials have great discretion in doling out the privilege of tariffs. Some producers get protected; others don’t. Here, the few rob the many.

At the other end of the spectrum, government officials have no discretion in doling out the privilege of tariffs because all industries are equally protected, to the same degree, by tariffs from import competition. Here, everyone robs everyone.

Pick any point along this spectrum, and you’ll find – in practice – some people robbing others but not themselves being robbed; other people robbing others while they themselves also are robbed; and yet other people who do no robbing but who are robbed.

What you’ll not find anywhere along this spectrum is a point at which no robbery occurs, for protectionism is in essence a scheme of organized theft.

Protectionists, as has often been observed, have the ethics of thugs. Regardless of their legerdemain or their excuses – or even their felt intent – they are all apologists for plunderers.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-03-17.

Powered by WordPress