Something To Be Thankful For: Fire (AKA Fossil Fuels)

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Something To Be Thankful For: Fire (AKA Fossil Fuels)

Before Thanksgiving weekend slips away, I want to pause to give thanks. Certainly I have many things to be thankful for — family (including a brand new grandson!), friends, reasonably good health, and plenty more. But this year I want to single out a particular thing that makes an enormous contribution to my well-being, productiveness, and enjoyment of life — and to everyone else’s well-being, productiveness, and enjoyment of life as well. I’m speaking of course about man’s control of fire. Or, as we say in up-to-date terminology, the use of fossil fuels.

We don’t know when early people first learned to control and use fire. But just the initial step without doubt brought large immediate benefits: the ability to cook food, and the ability to provide warmth in cold weather. Somewhat later, the use of fire also brought the ability to obtain metals like copper and then iron from rock. And it has been on up from there.

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The Idea That Just Won't Die: The Right Federal Program Can Solve Any Human Problem

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Let’s face it, our world is full of major human problems. Even very wealthy modern America has its share of these major human problems: poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and you could go on and on.

Now, how to address these problems? You could try this: Take a some of our very brightest thinkers. Send them to some top Ivy League or equivalent schools to get the very best educations. Then turn them loose into the policy arena, full of moral righteousness and energy and a burning passion to fix the world. And what will emerge? Remarkably, in every case you can find, what will emerge will be the exact same thing: a proposal for some new government “program” and spending that supposedly will fix whatever problem the particular guru may focus on at the moment.

The government in question will always be the federal government. Why not state governments (even all state governments) or local governments? My friend, have you no moral compass? Brilliant and righteous policy gurus do not go to Yale or Harvard or Princeton to think small. Fixing the world is going to require billions, and even trillions, and right now. Do not expect these experts to spend a decade or two in the wilderness in Nebraska trying go get some puny experimental program involving mere millions off the ground. These urgent problems must be fixed immediately, and all at once, and with whatever money it takes.

As you’ve been reading this introduction, likely the examples that have run through your mind include current progressive icons like free healthcare for all, free college for all, and so forth. And those are indeed excellent examples. But to illustrate the proposition of a new federal program as the solution to literally everything, let me take you on a tour through some op-eds and reviews that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal just over the past few days. . . .

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Could It Be That Islam Has A Problem?

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In today’s academia, the reigning ideology, when it is not socialism, is “multiculturalism.” Try to get a handle on what that means, and it’s not so easy. Go to Wikipedia for a definition, and you will find a string of innocuous and anodyne platitudes (“Multiculturalism as a political philosophy involves ideologies and policies which vary widely, ranging from the advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, through policies of promoting the maintenance of cultural diversity, . . .”) But you know there’s a lot more to it than that. For starters, there’s the characteristic self-loathing for all things Western. And then there’s the insistence that other cultures (however that term may be defined) are somehow inherently superior to ours and may not be criticized.

At the top of the list of cultures that may not be criticized is Islamic culture. For anyone who draws the ire of the progressive left, no list of accusatory epithets (“racist, sexist, misogynist, ageist, . . .”) is complete without the obligatory “Islamophobic.” The suffix “phobic” implies some kind of irrational fear, as in “acrophobia” (irrational fear of heights) or “germophobia” (not a real word, but you get the picture).

But could it be that Islam has a real problem — not something arising out of irrational fear, but something based in actual evidence?

The Gatestone Institute is a think tank with a daily email that covers issues of international affairs and foreign policy that “the mainstream media fail to report.” One such issue is the treatment of Christian, Jewish, and other religious minorities in majority-Islamic countries. . . .

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Environmentalists Knock Themselves Out On The Keystone XL Pipeline

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As you are undoubtedly aware, today’s environmental movement has become almost entirely fixated on the effort to stave off “climate change” by having governments impose restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. But, despite what is now a few decades of end-of-days hysteria designed to force political action on the issue, the political process, both here and in most foreign countries, has led to the adoption of remarkably few of the restrictions sought by the activists. And even with a few restrictions imposed here and there (California, anyone?), total usage of fossil fuels continues to increase rapidly worldwide, most particularly in third-world countries that are still in the early phases of building out their electrical systems.

What is an environmental activist to do? Outside the United States, activists rarely have much in the way of alternative avenues to follow in their quest to block fossil fuel development. But here in the U.S., we have our nearly-infinitely-complex legal system, with fifty independent state court systems and 94 different federal district courts to look to — not to mention places like Puerto Rico and Guam if you want to get really clever — and endless statutes and common law theories, plus of course the Constitution itself, to support some kind of cause of action. If your goal is to block some project or development, somewhere out there there must be a theory to throw out and a judge who will give you an injunction for something. You just need to be creative, and to find the right judge. Go for it!

And thus we find that pretty much every project that anyone tries to get off the ground that involves fossil fuels in any way draws a lawsuit — or maybe two or five — seeking to block it. And then, many such projects — and perhaps most of them — get blocked, at least to the degree that some court issues an injunction of some kind. But here’s the remarkable thing: the forces of capitalism have tremendous creativity in getting around these things and going right on producing and transporting the fossil fuels. Is the flood of litigation actually having a meaningful effect? It is certainly driving up costs, but in terms of reducing the availability of the energy, I haven’t seen it.

If you want to look at a case to teach you the basics of how this game is played, you would be hard-pressed to find a better example than the recently-decided litigation over the Keystone XL pipeline. Let’s take a tour through the facts of that situation. . . .

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Amazon HQ2 Decision Provides Yet More Insights Into The Progressive Brain

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Amazon HQ2 Decision Provides Yet More Insights Into The Progressive Brain

Yesterday Amazon announced its decision on where to locate its new “second headquarters”; and as you no doubt already know, it chose to divide between two locations, one just outside Washington, DC, and the other in a part of Queens, NY, known as Long Island City. Each is to become the site for some 25,000 future jobs.

For those unfamiliar with New York geography, Long Island City is the neighborhood that you see over there on the opposite shore when you look across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. When I moved to New York in the 1970s, LIC was a very dreary and forgotten industrial area, known for small factories and a lot of truck traffic. But over the last 20 or so years it has gained traction as a location for residences and offices that are (somewhat) cheaper than Manhattan but very close and accessible. Four different subway tunnels connect LIC to Midtown. Most of the former industrial sites have by now been replaced with multiple dozen new large apartment towers.

Also in Long Island City, toward the northern end of it, is something called the Queensbridge Houses. According to the New York Times, Queensbridge Houses is “the country’s largest public housing project.” About 7000 people live there. Also according to the Times, most of the residents of Queensbridge Houses are either African American or Hispanic, and the median household income is “well below the federal poverty level.” This project is approximately one-half mile north — easy walking distance — from the spot where Amazon is proposing to build its new complex. Here is a picture of the housing project:

So, perhaps your first reaction is, the Queensbridge residents and other New York locals should view these new jobs are the best possible thing that could happen to the people of this enormous project. What better route could there be for them to improve their lives than to go out and get hired by Amazon? You’re not yet qualified? Get out and take some courses — you have a few years before the big hiring will take place. But if that’s what you are thinking, you just don’t understand the progressive brain. In fact, the progressive New Yorker views the residents of these projects as helpless children who have no agency of their own and no ability to do anything but sit around and wait for government handouts. To this way of thinking, tens of thousands of new high-paying jobs will not improve the Queensbridge residents’ lives at all, but will only serve to deepen the divide between the poor and the rich in New York.

Do you not believe that progressives really could think that way? Let me give you several quotes from the New York Times piece from yesterday . . .

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The Boundless Progressive Faith That More Money Will Solve The Problem This Time

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By now you very likely know that the voters of San Francisco have just approved a new business tax designed to raise $300 million per year to finally deliver the coup de grace to the problem of homelessness. In approving this measure, the San Franciscans were undeterred by the abject failure of places like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle to reduce “homelessness,” let alone eliminate it, through comparable massive spending increases. Indeed, all of those places have seen “homelessness” soar right along with the spending supposedly designed to have the opposite effect.

Readers here know well about the pervasive issue of government spending worsening the social problems it was supposedly going to fix. See, e.g., “poverty.” There are enough examples out there to fill this blog and many others. For today, let’s take a look at the fascinating subject of public schools, with a focus on those here in New York City.

Perhaps you recall the wave of teachers’ strikes that swept through Republican-led states earlier this year, including West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. The claim was that the schools needed additional “resources” to properly educate the kids. In each case the legislators backed down and upped the spending. Of course, most of the money went to the teachers to continue doing exactly what they were doing before (although somewhat higher pay was not necessarily inappropriate in these states). We’ll have to wait to see whether any evidence emerges that the spending increases lead to improved educational results.

But in the meantime, it should be extremely enlightening to see whether the highest spending states achieve superior results in return for their efforts. . . .

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