Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

UPDATED: Solyndra Loan Guarantee Program Bush’s Baby

Bush, Business, Constitution, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Fascism, Republicans, Technology

The way Republicans, in general—and Senators like Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in particular—are carrying on about Solyndra, you’d think that it was not “President George W. Bush’s administration,” and “the GOP-controlled Congress in 2005,” that cleared Solyndra to participate in this loan-guarantee program, and, even worse, passed the “legislation creating the loan guarantee program.”

Reports Dana Milbank of The Washington Post:

… the Republican paternity of the program that birthed Solyndra suggests some skepticism is in order when many of those same Republicans use Solyndra as an example of all that is wrong with Obama’s governance.
“Loan guarantees aim to stimulate investment and commercialization of clean energy technologies to reduce our nation’s reliance on foreign sources of energy,” Bush’s energy secretary, Sam Bodman, said in a Oct. 4, 2007, statement. It said the Energy Department had received 143 pre-applications for the guarantees and narrowed the list down to 16 finalists, including Solyndra.

Today, Fox News contributor Michael Goodwin affirmed that he had no issue with the underwriting by the government of certain crucial industries, only that funds allotted have to be administered judiciously.

Republican and Democratic members of the “Big-Government Party” sing from the same hymn sheet. Remember: There is no daylight between these factions once they come to power. Before a power grab, it’s all posturing.

UPDATE (Nov. 21): From the Facebook thread: For heaven’s sake: the point is that there is no difference between the Dems and the Rodents when it comes to the role of government. They both believe, irrespective of the founders’ constitution, that it is the role of the government to do just about anything it likes with funds it steals from us. The program created by The Shrub is unconstitutional, wrong, tantamount to theft. So what if thief # 1 opened the account and didn’t use it. Thief # 1 has no right to bolster any industry with my money. Or yours.

‘Math for Morons’

Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets, Healthcare, Trade

Having just feasted on an excellent, fresh, Chilean orange, here is a reminder, via the one and only John Stossel, that eating organic, local produce must not turn into an irrational fetish. Read “Math Lessons for Locavores”:

the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

MORE.

UPDATED: Solyndra Scandal

Barack Obama, Business, China, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics

“This new factory [Solyndra] is a result of the Recovery Act, a result of those loans,” puled Barack Obama back in 2009. “The company received the loan and expanded their operations,” the man continues with arrogant certitude. The president really doesn’t understand how a viable market functions. The fact that Solyndra was awarded $527 million from the taxpayers (at $479,000 per temporary job created), and was seen to be doing spiffy stuff with the funds—this, thinks Obama, is sufficient to secure a profitable market for the product.

Chris Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (Regnery, 2007), has the goods on the racket Obama is running for green energy’s special pleaders. Obama has created a bubble worth $80 billion dollars, stolen from productive workers and funneled into these unsustainable, gangrene “revenue streams”

The waste. The theft. The thug from Chicago.

UPDATE (Sept. 15): “At least four other companies have received stimulus funding only to later file for bankruptcy, and two of those were working on alternative energy,” reports Fox News. The companies implicate China in their uncompetitiveness. Prediction: American rent seeking will morph into a political opportunity for Donald-Trump like, bellicose synophobia. The perfect distraction.

What They Do In Dictatorships

Democracy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Individual Rights, Journalism, Justice, Law, Media, Middle East, Private Property

The courts, stacked as they are with judges who work for the dictator, want to put a brave rebel behind bars for shooting a predator on his property. The rebel shot and killed a wild, extremely dangerous animal that thrives in the dictator’s country. All the tribesman did was to aggressively repel from human habitat a creature that had become brazen, making itself at home near the man’s children as they played. It used to be that these tribesmen instilled fear in encroaching creatures. But thanks to decades of cultural and legal emasculation under the dictator, the queered men folk are no longer licensed to protect home and hearth. If they do, they lose their liberty.

I bet you thought this was Anderson Cooper reporting from Libya, botching the job of journalism, as is his wont.

No, this is about an American, one among many (Jeremy M. Hill, 33), who pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court to killing a grizzly bear with a rifle on his 20-acre property near Porthill, Idaho, at the Canadian border.

Jeremy Hill has six kids, ranging in age from 14 years old to 10 months old. At least five were home when the grizzly was killed, Mike Hill said. The bears had gone after some pigs in a pen that the kids had been raising, Mike Hill said.

I wonder how many Libyans have been arrested for shooting wild animals that threatened their families.

If given the choice, I’d choose the right to defend my life and property over the vote, any day.