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Archive for 2024
March 31, 2024
SUNDAY MORNING OPEN THREAD: I mean, why not?
WELL, THEN, NO WORRIES: John Bolton suggests Trump ‘hasn’t got the brains’ to be a dictator.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Carhartt Men’s and Women’s K87 T-shirts. #CommissionEarned
“MIGRANT INFLUENCER” Arrested. “When we last checked in on illegal ‘migrant influencer’ and scam artist Leonel Moreno, he was on the run from authorities after his despicable story went viral. Of course, we’re using the phrase ‘on the run’ rather loosely because Moreno didn’t seem to making much of an effort to hide. He continued putting out “influencer” videos on Instagram after his TicToc account was suspended and he posted on other social media platforms. He posed for selfies in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, including one where he was standing in front of a police car. But if Moreno thought he was untouchable, his assumption turned out to be incorrect. ICE officers arrested him yesterday and took him into custody. He was still in Columbus and apparently had made no effort to flee. His immediate fate is unclear at this point.”
March 30, 2024
OPEN THREAD: It’s almost Saturday night.
THE GLOBAL BABY BUST: Birth Rates Are Plummeting in Most Nations, And The World Isn’t Prepared.
WELL, THEY’RE BOTH DRIVEN MOSTLY BY CHINA: Global Warming and Plastic Pollution Are Inextricably Trapped in a “Vicious Circle.”
EASTER AND THE MOST VIP FACT OF HISTORY: Like Paul said, if the resurrection isn’t literally true, then Christians are the biggest fools of all. But if it is true …. my latest PJMedia column.
EVERYTHING IS FINE:
There are 3 overlapping crises happening right now. A cold US civil war, a breakdown of the international order into a 3, perhaps 4 front global conflict and the revollt against 20th century materialist ideology. Everything is shifting and there is a scramble to come out on top.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 29, 2024
Related:
Human beings assign a low subjective probability to events outside their normal experience, even if historic data assigns it a higher probability. "It can't happen to me". War is one of those things. It is something that happens only in the movies.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 30, 2024
HEH:
I asked Jesus why the footprints in the sand were so erratic. He said, “when you walk without rhythm, it won’t attract the worm”.
— Gerry McBride (@GerryMcBride) March 20, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Trail Camera, 48MP 1296p, Clear 100ft Night Vision. #CommissionEarned
READER FAVORITE: All-new Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet. #CommissionEarned
CRISES BY DESIGN: The Coming Electricity Crisis.
President Biden and the press keep raising alarms about a climate crisis that his policies can’t do much about. Yet in the meantime they’re ignoring how government climate policies are contributing to a looming electric-grid crisis that is more urgent and could be avoided.
These pages have been warning for years about an electric-power shortage. And now grid regulators and utilities are ramping up warnings. Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.
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Georgia Power recently increased 17-fold its winter power demand forecast by 2031, citing growth in new industries such as EV and battery factories. AEP Ohio says new data centers and Intel’s $20 billion planned chip plant will increase strain on the grid. Chip factories and data centers can consume 100 times more power than a typical industrial business.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the wholesale power market across 13 Midwest and Northeast states, this year doubled its 15-year annual forecast for demand growth. Its projected power demand in the region for 2029 has increased by about 10 gigawatts—about twice as much as New York City uses on a typical day.
Don’t expect the power to come from New York, which is marching toward a power shortage as it shuts down nuclear and fossil-fuel power in favor of wind and solar. A new Micron chip factory in upstate New York is expected to require as much power by the 2040s as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.
Electricity demand to power data centers is projected to increase by 13% to 15% compounded annually through 2030. Yet a shortage of power is already delaying new data centers by two to six years, according to commercial-real estate firm CBRE Group. It is also driving Big Tech companies into the energy business. Amazon this month struck a $650 million deal to buy a data center in Pennsylvania powered by an on-site 2.5 gigawatt nuclear plant.
Data centers—like manufacturing plants—require reliable power around the clock year-round, which wind and solar don’t provide. Businesses can’t afford to wait for batteries to become cost-effective. Building transmission lines to connect distant renewables to the grid typically takes 10 to 12 years.
Because of these challenges, Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
As Lionel Shriver writes: Going electric requires electricity. Who knew? “Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.”
‘LIKE AN A**HOLE:’ Megyn Kelly Mocks Don Lemon After Report On List Of Demands For Musk.
Sirius XM’s Megyn Kelly mocked former CNN host Don Lemon’s list of demands from Elon Musk, and suggested Lemon looks “like an asshole” Wednesday.
Lemon reportedly gave Musk an extensive list of demands when the two negotiated the terms of their abandoned partnership to air the former CNN host’s new show, “The Don Lemon Show,” on X. Kelly laughed at the “hubris” of Lemon, who reportedly demanded a Tesla Cybertruck a trip on a SpaceX rocket and the authority to approve or reject Musk’s future news or current events talent deals.
“As somebody who actually has negotiated several contracts in cable news and broadcast news — no! That’s exactly the opposite of what you do,” Kelly said. “You make a demand that is reasonable, that is a big … because you want to leave yourself some room for negotiation. But you don’t want to make yourself look like an asshole, right? … You don’t want to make yourself look like an asshole.”
Unlike management at NBC, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, all of which tolerated the narcissistic explosions of their divas with bylines, give Musk credit for showing Lemon the door.
TO BE FAIR, I CAN SEE WHY THIS MOVIE WOULD BE RADIOACTIVE IN JAPAN: Oppenheimer Finally Opens In Japan; Met With Mixed Reactions.
“But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch,” the person added, warning that he’s not “sure this is a movie that Japanese people should make a special effort to watch.”
Another Hiroshima resident, Agemi Kanegae, told the outlet, “The film was very worth watching. But I felt very uncomfortable with a few scenes, such as the trial of Oppenheimer in the United States at the end.”
While a younger movie goer, 19-year-old student Rishu Kanemoto, said after seeing the movie, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were dropped, are certainly the victims.”
“But I think even though the inventor is one of the perpetrators, he’s also the victim caught up in the war,” he added.
Former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka said, “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted,” per a Japanese media outlet. “The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans.”
Yes. And as Roger Kimball wrote last year: The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too.
This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.
Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to being used today than ever since World War Two because of the endless war in Ukraine.”
That is a sobering thought. To his succeeding questions “Was this worth doing? Was it moral to build such an extreme weapon?” I would answer “yes” and “yes.” I also, by the way, support our use of this most horrible weapon in Japan. Why? Because its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. In so doing, it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Data point: the military is still using the huge supply of Purple Hearts it manufactured in anticipation of an invasion of the Japanese home islands*.
But put the number of American lives saved to one side. The use of the bomb, by ending the war, also saved millions of Japanese lives.
This was widely understood at the time. In subsequent years, however, a new, mostly left-wing, narrative has grown up which faults President Truman for using the bomb. Today, as Oliver Kamm noted in the Guardian, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are often used as a shorthand terms for war crimes.
That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave laborers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire — and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.
* Somebody should make a video about that:
OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: Woodward and Bernstein write All the President’s Men.
The New Hotness? Masked-up Taylor Lorenz attends Pornhub awards.
The Pornhub Awards party was announced at the end of January 2024 and is the 6th annual awards event put on by the company. A news release about the event stated, “The nominees and other event details will be announced shortly. For now, save the date – March 28!”
“A note for all Models; now is a great time to update your profile picture or upload a photo album with some sexy and SFW pictures! If you are nominated for an award, we will use photo assets from your Model profile to celebrate and share your achievement,” it added.
Pornhub, owned by the company Aylo, has come under fire for many controversies such as distributing child pornography.
It has also pulled its services out of several states such as Texas, Utah, and others over age verification laws that are designed to protect minors from being exposed to pornographic content.
As our sister site Twitchy asks: Career Change Coming? Taylor Lorenz Attends Adult Streaming Site Awards … in a Mask, Obviously.
Otherwise, what dirt does Lorenz have on her bosses at the WaPo that she continues to be employed there?
Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The President’s War Against the Jews.
More than 40 years ago, Joe Biden prompted one of the most famous phrases ever uttered by an Israeli prime minister. In a private session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1982, Sen. Biden threatened Prime Minister Menachem Begin with cutting off U.S. aid if Israel did not stop its “settlements” in Judea and Samaria.
Begin replied: “Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Biden’s scorn for Israel’s current PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, is significantly more vocal, referring to Netanyahu as a “bad f****ing guy” and an “a**hole”—language that is difficult to imagine him using about any other leader of a friendly foreign state. More recently, as he swaggered his way out of the State of the Union, doing his whispering, leaning-in shtick, Biden told Blinken and others, “I told him, Bibi, and don’t repeat this, but you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting.” Biden knew he was on a hot mic and admitted as much. He wanted the world to know what he thinks of Israel’s PM, and to broadcast that he was putting the squeeze on Israel to force it to forgo its ability to defend itself. In fact, this has been Biden’s posture from day one.
* * * * * * * *
Biden owns this war imposed on Israel. The president inherited a Middle East marked by a bankrupt Iran and amicable relations between Israel and Arab countries with more in the works, thanks to President Trump’s historic Abraham Accords. Biden reversed course, enriched Tehran, funded terrorists and destabilized the Middle East—setting the stage for Oct. 7.
Read the whole thing, but it’s curious that CTL-F “Obama” brings up zero results, despite Joe’s Middle East policy being a direct continuation of Barry’s.