Steven Mufson, writing in the Washington Post, noted that long before the Solyndra debacle, Washington had been in the habit of playing venture capitalist in the energy industry. It had failed in nearly every case. He cites the Clinch River Breeder reactor, synthetic fuel corporations, the hydrogen-powered car and clean coal — projects spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations. “Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra.”
Mufson may have spoken too soon. The Sons of Solyndra are still catching up. CBS News reports that there may be 11 more Solyndra-like catastrophes out there — ‘Green Energy’ projects sponsored by the Obama administration. Five have already filed for bankruptcy.
But the most important news is buried in the lede. It isn’t that there are deadly contact mines in the water. The real headlines are that the President is still saying, “damn the Solyndras, full speed ahead!” Why? Because everybody knows that Green Energy is good and therefore if one persists for long enough, even failures can become successes.
Watch the CBS video report here.
Some forgotten military wag said in an era long before quotes were attributed that “one should never reinforce failure because failure reinforces itself.” Everyone has heard it. Everyone that is, but Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Mufson describes how Chu regards the problem:
Despite this track record and the recent Solyndra failure, Energy Secretary Chu remains undeterred. Citing examples from Civil War-era railroads to airplanes to semiconductors, he has defended government’s role in funding new technologies and promising companies.
“Americans have always led by looking ahead. Even in the midst of the Civil War, when our country was under incredible stress, we planned for the future,” Chu said in September. “President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which authorized generous public financing for two private companies — Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific Railroad Company — to lower the investor risk in building railroads in unsettled territories. In 1869, the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, revolutionizing transport in this country and opening up a world of possibilities for industry.”
The basic argument is that only government can afford to keep repeating mistakes if the process leads to eventual breakthroughs. But Stanford University professor Richard White, a historian of the American West who wrote “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” points out the basic problem: the view doesn’t coincide with the actual facts.
“I admire Steven Chu a great deal, but his knowledge of the Pacific Railway Act unfortunately appears to be about equal to my knowledge of high-energy physics,” White said in an interview. He said the legislation produced a disaster far larger than the lifeless factory that Solyndra has left behind.
White said that Union Pacific and Central Pacific became two of the most hated corporations in the West, spawning political opposition wherever they went. Within 10 years of giving them land grants and loan guarantees, the federal government reversed its policy and eventually sued to recover its investment. The litigation dragged on into the 20th century.
Surely it is fair to ask why is government is so poor at picking winners or losers — or as others would put it — making investments for the future. One possible reason is that they are investing other people’s money and act differently from those who are putting their own necks on the line.
The other reason is politics. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow recalls Danny Kaye’s line that some people’s favorite sport is “jumping to conclusions”. When Kahneman speaks of factors like “the neglect of ambiguity and the suppression of doubt”, “a bias to believe and confirm” and perhaps most relevantly, “the halo effect”, he is talking about a political process.
You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan’s generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And now that you believe she is generous, you probably like Joan even better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes. Real evidence of generosity is missing in the story of Joan, and the gap is filled by a guess that fits one’s emotional response to her. In other situations, evidence accumulates gradually and the interpretation is shaped by the emotion attached to the first impression.
Kahneman, Daniel (2011-11-03). Thinking, Fast and Slow (p. 82). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.
Thus people who are politically allied to the President are unlikely to see the situation for what it is, especially if they work for him. Chu in the last analysis, can never say the President is all wet. And as for the President, the money he’s throwing at the Solyndras isn’t his anyway — and he’s giving it to his supporters to boot. The incentives could not be more perverse.
This is a radically different situation from one in which the investor is the steward of his own money, or who works for people investing their money. Then the entire focus is to find a heuristic that leads to success; if there isn’t one the incentive is to recognize categorical failure as soon as it becomes clear and stop the loss, because it’s your money that you are losing.
Where better to look a the future of a politically driven system than Europe, where President Obama himself looks for inspiration. Andrew McKillop, a former energy policy expert at the European Commission, writes that ‘Green Energy’ across Europe is unsustainable. It is “free-wheeling to disaster”, creating higher energy costs, power shortages and ever-increasing government subsidies. As a result, political support for it is declining, though few have yet been so bold as to openly bolt from the ranks.
Current goals and strategies are in most cases neither sustainable nor rational, as shown by growing political criticism and the loss of broad support amongst the public for what are perceived as expensive and unnecessary, irrational or perverse goals and strategies …
Presently we have a lose-lose context for all players except financial, and for them and as ever, this is short term gain only. Overall costs for achieving any specific level of green energy development are massively raised by this lose-lose context, which can only drive a general loss of credibility for green energy. One thing is sure: the present outlook for green energy transition in Europe is not sustainable and will change.
Perhaps even the President sees it coming, hopes the crash won’t affect him politically. It was reported that administration knew in advance that Solyndra was doomed but exerted pressure on the company to keep going until the 2010 elections had passed, the better not to shake the faith of the true believers. In the end it was all about ‘optics’ and not at all about sunlight.
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W, the UTube is setting over the middle of your text.
“It was reported that [the] administration knew in advance that Solyndra was doomed but exerted pressure on the company to keep going until the 2010 elections had passed, the better not to shake the faith of the true believers.”
Not hard to believe. What should bring consternation to the Obama true believers is how this problem might (and should) affect the 2012 elections. Just maybe the majority of the electorate will say ‘enough is enough’ and be done with this idiocy.
An Obamanite is not dismayed by these results or statistics.
They will cite the fact that venture capital expects to fail 9 out of 10 times, and get well on the tenth.
They will cite the fact that DARPA fails 99 out of 100 times, yet gets well on the one-hundredth, and that it is the unique value of that kind of thinking that has made America great.
(dang thing launched itself and I had to wait five minutes for the edit widget to show up!)
Also the Obamanite will tell you that green energy is *worth* paying somewhat more for, especially if it supports US jobs – that last being the hardest part, apparently.
Of course the mere spending of the money comprises a convenient economic stimulus of sorts, especially if it is likely, after all, to be a necessary and productive expenditure anyway.
And of course it is all a lovely opportunity for graft on a scale not often seen. And a payoff to the sensibilities of the progressive greens who seem to flock to the democratic party.
–
The difficult thing is that there is some rational economic justification to many of these arguments. However, it does not remove the need to watch for the kind of bloated gold-plating apparently going on at Solyndra that will kill any effort. Much less backing of really dumb ideas, which will exhaust your money so you don’t GET even one out of ten or even one out of a hundred. Unfortunately, I think Solyndra qualifies under that one as well. Cylinders my a**. Pyramids are obviously better. OMG.
Laughter is still the best ammunition… er, I mean medicine:
http://www.stevebridges.com/obamavideos-promo-Aug-2011.html
Josh, I had your edit widget. Took me the five minutes to be rid of the dang thing.
The very funny 1968 comedy The Producers gives the scheme underlying green energy policy.
In the film, the Producer (Zero Mostel) tells his accountant that he has sold shares adding up to way more than 100% of his projects. The accountant (Gene Wilder) says that is impossible and illegal. Still, as long as the productions lose money, no one will care about the particular portion that they own.
Green energy is supported by scientists who want grants, and by a wishful part of the public who care more about saving the world than the cost. However, the reason that all of this has political support is that huge amounts of money can be spent by government and wasted, with flowback political contributions, as long as no one expects those projects to pay for themselves.
It is exactly the expected failure and expense of green energy which hides the graft.
The slogan is “Of course these technologies will lose money for 5-10 years. That is the expected cost of a new industry.” Yes, any industry formed by government with public subsidies and mandates.
Solyndra was supported with loan guarantees. The investors would have owned a successful Solyndra. The government loses and pays back the investors in the failed Solyndra. The government (the taxpayers and public) would lose even if many of these projects succeeded, because we don’t have a share of the winners, only the losers.
The Political Manual: Adequate Compensation
- Search for “Create new contracts”.
=== ===
Encourage new ideas for garbage processing, recycling, green government vehicles, resource management, environmentally sensitive school cafeterias, concrete with recycled content, or biodegradable curtains and furniture.
You and your family can form a service company FamCo which sells to a preferred company NewContractor. NewContractor can easily win the new government contracts by bidding 70% of the realistic price. It can be expected that the first application of a new technology will have cost overruns.
=== ===
And I just read that the Obama Admin is putting $48M into a new kind of geothermal power, which involves injecting millions of gallons of water as well as plastic into an extinct volcano in Oregon. They do fracking of the hot rocks and then inject water, hoping to get enough steam out to run a power plant.
So fracking is really bad – unless its “green.”
When private investors decide to invest in a company, they ask “How much money will you make?”
When governments invest, they ask “How many jobs will you provide?” and they warn “Make sure your profits are low”. No government official wants to be blamed for creating millionaires by giving away money.”
That is why government sponsored businesses fail. The business are designed to spend lots of money (good for the economy) and make very little profit (don’t gouge the public).
There is a class of people who get rich by running companies into the ground. Everybody gets paid well, no one gets fired, and one day the company is closed and all the workers and management collect government benefits.
“…if one persists for long enough, even failures can become successes.”
Or as the Marxists might say, centuries of failure prove nothing.
RWE @ 7 said:
“the Obama Admin is putting $48M into a new kind of geothermal power, which involves injecting millions of gallons of water as well as plastic into an extinct volcano in Oregon”
I wonder if any of Oregon’s volcanoes are really extinct? Screwing around with a live volcano in the Pacific Northwest is a really bad idea. They tend to explode and cause more damage than a large nuclear weapon.
I don’t think that governments should use tax revenues as venture capital. I think that is better done by – oh say – venture capitalists.
History tells me that there are no political solutions to most economic problems. Government should create an environment that fosters private enterprise and establish a stable set of rules that can be used to referee enterprise and consistently penalize those who break the rules. Then government should stop bothering people and go talk to itself in some fancy talking palace situated near some equally fancy restaurants.
Government incentives for a start-up enterprise, if they really can be justified, can be provided in ways that don’t make bets with huge chunks of the taxpayer’s money. Even so it seems to me that government always gives incentives for political, not economic reasons, whatever they may say. For example those incentives to lay down railroad tracks all over the scenery were driven by territorial ambitions/fears in both America and Canada.
I think that government so called “economic incentives” are really “political incentives”. Since a government is elected to carry out some stated policies there may be nothing wrong with incentives used to implement a policy. Depressingly, it’s a fact that many “political incentives” disguised as “economic incentives” eventually reveal themselves to be that ill favoured beast called “social engineering”.
Ahhh Chu!
The fact that “CBS reports” on the green failures is note worthy in itself.
“Clinton Broadcasting System” and “Communist Broadcasting System” are just a few of the nicknames it has had to indicate its bias for Democrats. My magic tinfoil hat indicates something has gone bad for Obama over there.
I kind of wonder what their excuse is going to be if they have a major volcanic KABOOM at the Oregon site? Will it be Bush’s fault again?
Unless you grew up in Chicago or studied the Democratic machine you don’t get it. It has never been Obama’s intention that anything useful would come out of green energy. It has always been a scheme for Obama and his cronies to loot the public purse. These green energy firms are merely shell companies that will produce nothing of value but provide a mechanism to effect the transfer of taxpayers money to machine cronies. If you are looking for a template from Obama’s past that does this on a smaller scale look no farther than the 2001 Illinois earmark for a botanic garden in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago…
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/25/where-did-the-money-for-obama-gardens-go/
This is Solyndra in minature.
Geothermal fracking has produced all of the worst earthquakes since it entails lubricating crystalline super-heated rocks.
The entire notion is another Macondo.
—-
W
How can anyone forget Credit Mobilier?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_of_America_scandal
It was the worst financial scandal of the 19th Century — Solyndra on steroids.
Eggplant #10:
Yes, I was wondering about that, too. Note that nat gas fracking is being blamed for small earthquakes in AR and OH. Think what you could do by creating cracks in a volcano and then injecting 24 million gallons of water.
And I wonder what you do with the steam even if it works?
Actually they call it a “dormant” volcano. And they say they are being sure that they do the experiment in an unpopulated area.
And it turns out that of the cost, most is coming from private investors, including a lot from Google. $21M is Federal “stimulus” money. Who would have thought that stimulus money would be used to stimulate a volcano?
One thing I still don’t understand is why Texas, supposedly a hard-nose, practical, non-PC kind of place, is crotch-deep into windmill farms. I read about one that all by itself has about 260 turbines near San Angelo. That’s a lot of wasted money and I’ve never understood why Perry, et al went so hard for it.
g @ 16: One thing I still don’t understand is why Texas, supposedly a hard-nose, practical, non-PC kind of place, is crotch-deep into windmill farms.
The same geology – extended flat areas that make it tornado alley – means it has a lot of steady wind energy, … in somebody’s estimation.
Plus, if it works, energy is energy, and renewable is good, a little out of the box thinking by traditional Texas energy companies. FWIW.
As to the volcanoes, if they inject some tea leaves as well, at least they are likely to get one useful result.
“Despite this track record and the recent Solyndra failure, Energy Secretary Chu remains undeterred. Citing examples from Civil War-era railroads to airplanes to semiconductors, he has defended government’s role in funding new technologies and promising companies.”
“President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which authorized generous public financing for two private companies — Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific Railroad Company — to lower the investor risk in building railroads in unsettled territories. In 1869, the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, revolutionizing transport in this country and opening up a world of possibilities for industry.”
The whole point of the War of Northern Aggression was to keep the tax base of the federal government. Remember that Lincoln was an Illinois railroad lawyer. He needed money for the people who gave him the railroad car to do his campaigning from.
Dose any of this sound familiar?
“I’ve never understood why Perry, et al went so hard for it.”
T. Boone Pickens, the granddaddy of all energy crooks.
The Watermelons have no concept of Physics;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2010/01/26/the-price-of-energy/
The above URL is a lit of various fuel types on a million BTU basis.
Like all such lists, it is misleading. The list compiler makes certain assumptions that skew the results. Politics can also twist the cost curve into never-never land, where Michael hides it with his dirty pictures.
Solargate is an attempt by the watermelons to twist the cost factors into an area they find politically correct.
I used to have a chart showing BTU’s from different fuels on a cubic meter basis. One look at that chart and it becomes obvious why Mr. Otto chose Diesel and then switched to Petrol once Daimler figured out how to get a spark to the combustion chamber. The ONLY fuel that comes anywhere close to petrol is LNG and the storage problems were insurmountable in the late 19th century. Not sure we can build a blow-proof fuel tank for LNG today. At least not one lite enough to fit an automobile.
While figures never lie, liars do figure. I have never seen calculations for electric vehicles that accounted for the cost of generating the electricity those vehicles use.
Best guess is about 250 MILLION vehicles (autos, light trucks) running the roads of America. Replacing them with electrics would require how many power plants pumping out how much polution?
I have never seen any numbers on that either.
Without numbers, It’s a scam.
NDAA…Enemy Expatriation Act? Bueller? Bueller?
http://rt.com/usa/news/expatriation-act-citizenship-ndaa-737/
18. Langley
Nonsense.
But I’ll turn that one around. The whole point of Southern secession was to preserve the wealth of the landowner class, with slave ownership representing a significant percentage of their wealth. Wealth in the form of slaves also enabled the Southern elite to suppress any real hope of economic advancement by poor whites who could not compete for wages in a labor market dominated by slave labor. It was a nice set-up the white Southern elite had going for them, the bastards. My great-grandfather (shows you how old I am) along with four other male members of my family, all just five years off the boat from Ireland, fought for the Union in Illinois volunteer regiments; two were killed in battle–giving the last full measure of their devotion–and a third was permanently disabled. But they had the satisfaction of knowing that they played a role, however small, in destroying that cruel and despicable political entity known as the Confederacy.
They were moved to enlist and fight for their new country because they had been virtual slaves in their motherland, oppressed by tyrannical English rule. They knew what it was like to be downtrodden by a landowner class that in Ireland did nothing to relieve the ravages of the An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, which killed millions of Irish men and women through starvation and disease. They correctly saw a similar system at work in the South (which not coincidentally had the support of the English aristocracy) and decided that enough was enough.
War of Northern Aggression, my ass.
Just like technology has generated so much social change (as we have discussed with dispersion of knowledge and the dwindling influence of major media) , the technological shale revolution is doing much the same. The US now has natural gas (and thus electrical) costs lower than that of any major economic power in the world. This benefit will flow through to every buyer of gas and power, and is leading to a renaissance in hydrocarbon production and transportation, petrochemicals and fertlizer production just to name a few. All industries that were previously in decline and shedding good paying jobs.
If this technology spreads successfully to South America, China and other parts of the world, the influence of the OPEC nations along with gas majors like Russia is being challenged. Our leaders still seem to be fighting a rear guard action on Green Energy, which is becoming even more economically challenged as we speak with sub $3 nat gas. Doubtless that they aren’t even looking forward to the coming realignment of energy supply and what it means to us geopolitically. There could be some major benefits accruing to the USA if you had someone in leadership thinking strategically.
Energy Secretary Chu remains undeterred. Citing examples from Civil War-era railroads to airplanes
Academics like Chu rarely comprehend the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans like the Wright brothers. That wasn’t no government funding them, it was their successful, unsubsidized bicycle business. For him to claim airplanes as the result of government subsidies shows that his scientific abilities – which should require rigorous evidence before making such a conclusion – are not what they’re cracked up to be.
He also fails to credit other early airplane manufacturers, such as Glenn Curtiss. Wikipedia: Curtiss started US Naval Aviation by training pilots and providing aircraft. But he’s got his gummint job, so I suppose he thinks all creativity must be the result of taxpayer funding.
Rough – My family – like yours – fought on the wrong side during War of Northern Aggression.
My point was to show the similarities between Illinois politicians.
Both L and B were beholding to powerful financial entities.
Both used tax money to reward those backers. Both refer to the south as “ungovernable.”
What L did was to increase the number of slaves in “The” United States.
O is obviously trying to do the same.
#12 toadold
“Clinton Broadcasting System” and “Communist Broadcasting System” are just a few of the nicknames it has had to indicate its bias for Democrats.
It’s also known as “See BS” for the same reason.
You only have to think of how different playing high stakes poker would be using someone else’s money rather than your own bankroll.
“Surely it is fair to ask why is government is so poor at picking winners or losers — or as others would put it — making investments for the future. One possible reason is that they are investing other people’s money and act differently from those who are putting their own necks on the line.”
And a third is that most of those in government have no real-world experience, have been told all of their lives that they’re amazingly smart and can solve any problem, and so truly believe (in spite of all the evidence) that their ‘will to power’ can overcome reality. Witness Obama’s career, or Pelosi’s, or Boxer’s, or Barney’s, or…
#18 Langly
Whenever I read a phrase like “War of Northern Aggression” I just recall those photos of the backs of black slaves all whipscarred and welted and I think, ‘thank God for those aggressive northerners…’
Uncle Jefe
You seem to be unaware that almost to a man politicians are failed attorneys.
That such is true is a running gag in attorney circles.
So, what we see is ‘magical thinking’ on steroids.
The rest are apparently trying to get away from their wives.
( Lincoln said so of himself. )
So… we’re giving an enema to a volcano?
Is an apparently pig headed devotion to a reckless and lawless policy of destruction not an accident but a means of achieving the desired goals? The High Stakes Game now is guessing when the crash hits. Do the Donks expect to lose the White House and see the economy implode after the election, with attendant global death and destruction so Republicans get the blame for another 40 years? Do they expect it to happen before the election but believe that war and depression always drives the voters to the left? Before postulating the players motives it help to determine what is the game you are studying or sitting down at.
When I hear about Solyndra and all the other “venture capital” bets “the President” is making, I keep wondering when the U.S. Constitution was changed to allow the Executive Branch to appropriate and direct expenditures. The Senate hasn’t presented a budget in two years, and a whole year after the 2010 election changed control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Either the DOE “investments” were authorized by a GOP House, or President Obama is spending money that he controls that was misappropriated from one of the many “TARP” and “stimulus” slush funds. Unless someone can point to the specific appropriation authorized by Congress, and that bill says “Solyndra somewhere in the text, the Solyndra and other “green” expenditures were both unconstitutional, and criminal.
The GOP House should be all about recapturing revenue from any of the slush funds still open from prior appropriation years, and ordering audits of every damn penny this President has spent.
I will bet post-Obama, there will be stories and rumors of stories of graft that will make the term “Obamanomics” retire the term “Tammany Hall Democrats” forever.
With the amount of debt being accrued under this President, 2008 might as well have been the year of the American Coup d’Etat, when the U.S. Constitution died along with the rule of law. It is unconscionable to pass this kind of debt down to the next 200 years of future Americans, assuming the republic survives the debt. But under Obama, we’re just “taking it”.
O.S.
@24. Langley
“Rough – My family – like yours – fought on the wrong side during War of Northern Aggression.”
Bravo! The fact is that the New England elite and their incestuous cousins the English bluebloods won so many wars in the 19th and 20th centuries that they forgot that old adage about the victors writing the history. To this day they still believe their own lies.
The truth is that Lincoln was not only almost as big a racist as Obama and Holder, but that he clearly stated that the war of northern aggression was not about slavery. And the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the south that he couldn’t free anyway until he after he had waged a war of scorched earth against the entire south in a manner that foreshadowed Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But don’t expect Roughcoat or Dex Quire to acknowledge any history that contradicts their brainwashing by the US “education” system.
I particularly enjoyed this: “But they had the satisfaction of knowing that they played a role, however small, in destroying that cruel and despicable political entity known as the Confederacy.
They were moved to enlist and fight for their new country because they had been virtual slaves in their motherland, oppressed by tyrannical English rule. They knew what it was like to be downtrodden by a landowner class that in Ireland “
Give me a friggin break! All 4 probably took the payoff from rich Yankees trying to avoid being drafted into the war that these Yankees themselves had started. And the two that died wouldn’t even have known that Lincoln had succeeded in sacking the constitution and the dollar. But even worse, the two that died sacrificed their lives to help destroy the constitution, nullify the right of secession, and make every citizen of the US “virtual slaves in their motherland” for the next 150 years.
Green energy in Europe (such as individual solar units on homes) is also a function of electricity prices significantly higher than they are in the United States. So solar at that point “pencils” as an alternative.
Last year there was a rush of geothermal heat pump jobs in the US. Now geothermal is great if you live in a cold climate. Most of the US can get by just fine on a regular heat pump because the winters are generally mild. But in the northern tier states and the upper midwest, having the coils burried in the ground makes heat pumps work efficiently. The problem is you have to bury a lot of coils. For new construction, not a big deal, but for existing construction it is often expensive. No problems, the Government allowed a 30% tax rebate if you installed a system. Why do this? Most of these jobs would not have happened otherwise because they did not make economic sense to do. So why force it?
Not to get off topic, but I wonder why people are so ready to believe statistics provided by one dept of govt and yet totally deny that trust to other parts of the same govt?
Is it because at the core of our belief system we cannot accept a complete failure as an outcome? There must be some part of the govt where there is virtue and truth? Or is it because we seek confirmation of our closely held beliefs and when they present themselves, no matter the source, we accept them without question?
I say that to say this. When we make comparison judgements we have to define the parameters and more importantly the fixed costs of implementation.
Sure, it looks like LNG is the outright winner in the transportation category but the true cost of implementation of such a system will quickly overcome any savings and will in fact be a larger expense in the long run.
It comes down to break even timeline.
What hasn’t been considered is metered charging and how such as system could be implemented in urban areas quickly and efficiently by having the POS system incorporated into the vehicle itself instead of at the plug in site.
Think of a parking meter with a plug and it being smart enough to communicate with the car plugged into the socket. This works in almost all urban environments and can be expanded into small markets as well although the ROE will be decidedly slower in those markets.
By doing this we will put massive pressure on the power grid and that will generate a ground swell for small distributed power plants hopefully run on a pebble bed reactor system. Clean, Quiet and Easily maintained at reasonable cost.
It’s about time we started calling it Gang Green™ Energy.
jfs @ 35: What hasn’t been considered is metered charging and how such as system could be implemented in urban areas quickly and efficiently by having the POS system incorporated into the vehicle itself instead of at the plug in site.
That’s a cute idea but it doesn’t affect whether electricity is a good match for motive power or not. Methane/LNG (and for that matter, gasoline) promises to be awfully cheap for the next 50-100 years, perhaps cheaper than the best nuke power anybody has yet managed to build. Only if batteries get many times more weight/volume/capacity/cost efficient, will electric vehicles win. There *was* a report on a new IBM (!) lithium/air technology, but the claim was so outrageous I think it must have been garbled. If it’s true, buy IBM stock NOW!
EBL #34:
Geothermal systems used to be very popular here in Florida. Water was pumped out of the ground and used to cool the air conditioning condenser and thus enable it to work in conditions cooler than if it has used the ambiant air temperature. Then you had to get rid of the water. I had a friend whose house had a lawn sprinkler that popped up and ran whenever the AC was on, rain or shine.
Problem was, that water tended to rot out the AC coils. So most all of those systems have been replaced with more modern systems that have higher COPs and use ambiant air. The best idea I have heard of recently was using the AC to preheat the water that goes to the house water heater. The potable water is far less corrosive that which comes out of the ground and it not only cools the AC coils but also reduces hot water heating costs.
Interesting item I read about geothermal power some time ago. There was a guy who collected all the old Liberty Ship engines when the ships were scrapped and he made out very well, because those engines were found to be very suitable for use in geothermal power plants.
As for the War of Southern Secession, I was born and raised in SC and I can tell ya’ll what the war was really about was not slavery or even economics and geography, but rather simply whether the people in one state could tell those in another state what they had to do. The outcome of the war was good in terms of human rights but also meant the end of the 10th Amendment, which was terrible for human rights.
Use it in a sentence- “I hope those gummit swindlers don’t gang green us again anytime soon, I’m still pretty sore from the last time“. Or, “0bama and his gang of green pilferers…“. Or use it in an ad campaign- “Government Gangrene Energy- what you pay at the pump is only the beginning. Chu on that sports fans.
Don’t know if it’s been pointed out yet but ALL of Chu’s inventions were war time inovations. The Rail net on the east coast was born out of the need to move troops and supplies. The South out fought and out generaled the North, which left the Yankees no choice but go with attrition. That means logistics and railroads.
Modern electronics is a spinoff of the need to sink U-Boats and find Nazi bombers in the night sky.
“But they had the satisfaction of knowing that they played a role, however small, in destroying that cruel and despicable political entity known as the Confederacy.”
I wouldn’t say destroyed so much as took it over. I have money taken from me by extortion every payday to give to others without my consent. What would you call that?
So I guess the lesson is slavery is okay as long as you don’t forcibly import the slaves and you call it something else like, say welfare. The players are the same they just changed their names. Democrats have always been in favor of extortion.
Langley@18,
Thank you!
Most people accept the bullshit they were taught in [leftist-controlled] schools about slavery as the cause of the War of Northern Aggression. That war was really about money and power, and whether Northern states would use the Federal Government to impose their will on the South.
If your public library has The New York Times back to 1861, check out the 30 March 1861 editorial, which explained the rationale for invading the South — tariff revenue; who would collect it, and who would decide how to spend it. For some reason that particular editorial is not available on the Times web site, though other editorials of that period are available. Gee, I wonder why?
“Looking forward” is a conceit which all leftoids are born to. The cure is to lose one’s own employment, money, and well-being, which leftoids are adept at putting on someone else.
As Hayek understood, “man cannot foresee his own advance”. A healthy society advances through the creative destruction resulting from abstract rules of conduct, not commands.
Obama is still going full speed ahead in spite of all these companies failing because he is purposefully trying to burn as much money as he can and create as much debt as he can get away with.
Once the economy collapses, he has accomplished his goal of cutting America down to a third world country. Then we will be malleable to become a communist/socialist country .
mariner
Buchanan beat Lincoln to the punch.
The Democrat Party got the Supremes to impose southern sate laws upon the north by way of the Dred Scott ruling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
It was the SOUTH that Federalized racial oppression upon the North.
Read the Cooper Union Address.
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm
Therein Lincoln utterly destroys the southern arguments — to include yours.
This one speech sent him the the White House. He never actively campaigned in the modern sense.
———
As for the crazed idea that the war was over anything but the maintenance and expansion of slavery — that peculiar institution — is absurd on its face.
To do so is to engage in fulsome reconstructionism — Leftist style.
———
As for the idea that the slave states HAD to flee the union: they held enough votes to entirely frustrate abolitionist desires for generations. No Constitutional Amendment could hope to surmount that solid bloc of opposition.
The ONLY proximate goal of the North was to return to the status quo BEFORE Dred Scott. For a list of all of the, now forgotten, deals made between the North and the South over slavery — and its non-expansion — read Lincoln’s address.
—–
You haven’t a peg leg to stand on.
——-
W
We seem to be attracting MOBYS.
For these outrageous postings stink of dis-information operations.
The very term ‘War of Northern Aggression’ is agitprop designed to smear the commentariat of the BC.
—–
Elsewhere, we are seeing Democrat agitprop insults systematically directed at the ENTIRE Republican list. This is being done by way of directed web campaigns using ‘comedic’ impersonators to put words into the mouths of candidates.
31 – “Do the Donks expect to lose the White House and see the economy implode after the election, with attendant global death and destruction so Republicans get the blame for another 40 years?”
So you’ll have to make sure that the next Republican President is ambidexterous: able to sign arrest warrents with his left hand while his right hand is still resting on the Bible, taking the Oath of Office.
40. Stoich..
Modern electronics is a spinoff of the need to sink U-Boats and find Nazi bombers in the night sky.
Another reason why war is good (necessary). If you believe in Darwin war has existed since the “beginning”. It is essential to human “progress”. Forthcoming nuclear war may be a substantial reset in human progress.
What would the world population be today without war. Of course, without war modern medicine would not be factor in controlling the microbes that cause early death.
The arguments made by blert @ 45 concerning the Civil War are essentially correct. The Civil War started over the issue of preserving the union but the institution of slavery was always the driving issue. The southerners had ambition of setting themselves up as 19th century Spartiates ruling over African and Hispanic helots (the southern states had ambition of extending an empire of sorts into the Caribbean and Mexico). The Civil War nipped all of that in the bud.
I see neither Blert nor Eggplant has bothered to read the NTY editorial I mentioned. It presented the actual rationale for war, rather than the self-serving revisionist bullshit that has been taught for decades.
The War of Northern Aggression was a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence and an inversion of the Constitutional principle that the Federal Government was a creation of the states and subordinate to them, but “the winners get to write history”.
On a very narrow technical basis the South had an argument that the North was breaching the original constitutional compact by failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. The FSA was authorized by the Constitution and the Northern states did have an obligation to cooperate in its enforcement. The Southern states did cite that as a justification in their Acts of Secession. Doing so however ignores the changed conditions since the Revolution, especially the mendacity of the Southern Democratic Party elites as evidenced by the Dred Scott decision. After Dred Scott the moderate majority in the North, who had been willing to tolerate the “peculiar institution” in the South as long as it did not visibly impinge on their liberties, swung to the Republican Party and refused any cooperation with agents of the slave states.
The Civil War was begun by the Trial Lawyers, Judges and Justices of the Democratic Party. They represented a narrow oligarchy that sought to strangle in Southern states under their control small businesses in nascent industrial areas with low slave populations, such as Western Virginia and Northern Alabama. They also sought to limit the growth of Northern industry and the immigration of free labor. Doing so would cement their power over a subservient population while enabling them to divert income from the productive modernizing areas under the Republican Party, then the North, to subsidize the backwards region, then the South, and it’s foreign supporters that competed with the US economy. Same as it ever was.
Fortunately for the Union the 19th century foreign allies of the Democrats who sought to weaken and hold back the growing United States, then English Manufactures as it is now Chinese with lingering hostility to American Republicanism among many European elites, were frustrated by the rise of competing commercial interests to Southern agriculture, mainly Indian cotton. That and the dependence of even reactionary politicians on support from newly enfranchised free labor left the Confederates isolated. Similarly the schemes of the oil ticks (OPEC) and the corrupt powers in the EU Russia and China are being frustrated by the rise of new sources of energy and the affection for America among millions who have escaped from the tyranny of the Left within the last generation.
blert is correct. There is a correlation between the Confederate nostalgists and the Ron Paul thread jacking enthusiasts. They are objectively, as the Old Left would have phrased it, working as agents of the Democratic Party.
The big “tell” on the Paulbots is their resorting to the preemptive honorific “the honorable” when referring to the aging Congresscritter of little influence or achievement. The only other public character so described by his followers was Elijah Muhammed of the Nation of Islam.
I don’t have any dog in the ‘War of the Northern Aggression’ bit, except to say that Lincoln basically suspended the Constitution and did indeed finally find generals who waged it with scorched Earth in Grant, Sheridan and Sherman after enduring 2 1/2 years of useless slaughter with Copperheads in the ranks like McClellan.
The evidence is overwhelming that the South seceded due to slavery, but…it also seems doubtful that hundreds of thousands of young Southern men would have kept fighting particularly after Gettysburg in the dim hopes of one day becoming slave owners themselves (with all due respect to Spengler, this is the weakest part of his argument in ‘When America Flew on One Wing’ about how the Civil War was seen by many as God’s judgement on America for tolerating slavery).
Perhaps the Southerners were whipped up with dire propaganda of what would happen if they lost, in much the same way the Germans kept furiously fighting on the Eastern Front after all hope of a separate peace with Stalin was lost after Kursk and the Lend-Lease equipped Red Army moved in for the kill after Kiev in late 43′ following the Anglo-American landings forcing the garrisoning of Italy.
Both sides here therefore should probably tone down the rhetoric. The Northern carpet baggers did turn Reconstruction into an excuse for massive looting while the local population was disenfranchised — in some sense, it reminds me of what Jeffrey Sachs and Co and other Western carpetbaggers did in cooperation with local oligarchs in 1990s Russia. You cannot help for example but look at Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s career and not think he was marked right out of the Komsomol for greater things, or examine the improbability of George Soros selling the largest steel complex to Vladimir Lisin a few years ago and wonder how the hell Soros managed to hang on to such a juicy asset during the vicious ‘metal wars’ of the Nineties. Clearly, mokre kryshe, as the Russians say. Soros had government backing of some sort.
And that after the war the Supreme Court basically admitted that the indefinite detention of citizens AND massive printing of debased fiat money were both unconstitutional steps, and that gold and (at the state and western territory level) silver-backed currency was restored post-war…but the SCOTUS explicitly refused to say the massive inflationary issuing of greenbacks was unconstitutional, leaving the door open to FDR’s gold confiscation devaluation schemes in the 1930s.
http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/interview-dr-edwin-vieira
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Tender_Cases
BFTP, sorry to rain on your parade, but there are no ‘Paul-bots’ here, and I have nothing to do with apologetics for the Confederacy (coincidentally, Czarist Russia backed the Union!).
As I see it there are only a bunch of old fart Cold Warriors sitting around praising the Military Industrial Complex as the well spring of all innovation and disdaining as a grave threat to the Republican Party a movement led by a frail 76-year-old M.D. The sheer vitriol directed towards Dr. Paul is out of all proportion to his alleged unelectability — if he’s unelectable, why so much hate? Republicans were far less cognitive dissonant when they just flat out ignored him and cheered when Fox News gave him 89 seconds to speak in the first South Carolina debate. At least that position, while shamefully pro-controlled Right Establishment, made some sense.
In reality, PJM has been dominated by swarms of ‘anti-Paulbots’ with the full complicity of several editors, not including Wretchard or Glenn Reybolds or even Spengler (who didn’t censor, but joined in Simon and Preston’s anti-Paul hysterics). Preston has totally censored my comments because he did not like me directly asking him where was all his contempt for Ron Paul’s positions back in the mid-2000s when he was working for the Texas Republican Party alongside Dr. Paul and Paul’s aides.
PJM was either paid a considerable sum of money by the Newt or most likely Perry campaigns, or drank the koolaid that Paul is some sort of terrible threat to Israel. All of the Paul hate has relied on the twin fallacies that:
1) The GOP would not find a way to cheat Paul out of the nomination even if he came anywhere close to it.
2) In the extremely unlikely event Paul is elected and the banksters suffer him to live, Paul would be some sort of dictator who could force Congress to immediately kick its addiction to unlimited fiat and the spending it enables.
And BFTP, where’s your evidence that Russia is somehow massively supporting enemies of the U.S.? You’ve spewed Cold War nostalgiac nonsense for so long that like your idol John McCain you don’t even know how to respond except with sputtering when confronted about it.
47. SirWalterRalegh And people who praise or otherwise let slide crap like this deserve to get chewed on now and then. To hear some old farts here tell it you’d think Eisenhower was some sort of Communist for warning about the Military Industrial Complex rather than the 2nd greatest President of the 20th century under whom the long march of corporatist statism at least had a pause.
Look, stop being sheeple for the MIC, the criminal Federal Reserve and the banksters. If there is no ‘stash’ for any type of social safety net to survive then for damn sure there’s no maintaining military bases in 120 countries and continuing to fight a useless war in Afghanistan or starting another one with Iran. Look at the Obama administration seemingly appearing to back off on the Iran attack rhetoric. Either too many people in the military objected (Mullen basically told Cheney he’d resign if ole’ Darth Warmonger tried to create a false flag in the Persian Gulf) or the Chinese politely informed America that they can take a big dump with their U.S. Treasuries as soon as the bombs start falling and oil hits $200 a barrel. The Chinese economy will already be in the $^&ter if that happens anyway, they might as well make D.C. feel the pain while they’re at it.
Stop blaming Obama for the fact that America is now massively in hoc to its former Cold War adversaries and start looking in the mirror. You people accepted what Fox News spoonfed you throughout the Bush years. You people kept subscribing to NR and the Weekly Standard when they told you Iraq would be a cakewalk and deficits didn’t matter, and Rich Lowry said leave poor Ben Bernanke alone.
You people have cheered or stayed silent when that sniveling little RINO weasel Lindsey Graham said, “You don’t get no lawyer!” And now you’re shocked, shocked! Obama’s flirting with just dispensing with Congress altogether…
Ok I’m done ranting now. Enjoy $7 a gallon when you get the war with Iran you’ve been hungering for. That’s gonna hurt a lot of BCers, especially those like Roughcoat who are out of work…
It is a continuing problem that we just don’t learn from history – even physicists who control tens of billions of our dollars. The government supported railroads all were economic failures. There was another railroad that got no federal money and this one did not economically fail.
The Great Northern was the only privately funded, and successfully built, transcontinental railroad in United States history. No federal land grants were used during its construction, unlike every other transcontinental railroad built. It was one of the few transcontinental railroads to avoid receivership following the Panic of 1893.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_%28U.S.%29
vic…
That $ 7.00 gallon price will not be reached without massive money printing.
Current economic contractions are destroying net demand.
America is so awash in gasoline that we are sending massive amounts overseas to Europe as I post.
IF Iran is dumb enough to actually do something — it will signal her end.
That’s why her currency is in free fall.
KSA has ALREADY made assurances to the Europeans that they will be covered if they back away from Kharg Island.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3122
Indeed, that’s why ANY talk of a European embargo is muted.
Asia is a different story. For them Iran is still too essential.
( Japan is still recovering from the tsunami. )
The hope is that Sinopec and others will drive brutally hard bargains as they attain monopsony leverage over Iran.
As for Putin & Co. the realization has set in that Iran is too close to their end game — so much so that playing the Iranian card has come to an end.
How can you guys worry about everyday stuff like the world economy, civil wars and President Obama when Green Bay gets defeated by a team from New York?? New York is the American Toronto; the bottom of the barrel; the city everyone loves to hate; the town where Bloomberg is Mayor; the city whose hockey team beat Vancouver in the Stanley Cup; the place where New York taxi drivers live.
My genuine cheese-head hat is wet with tears. Have to wring it out and put it in the dryer. The fabric of life just got torn.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.5ac8cc19445558189357128508908e39.3f1&show_article=1
Good grief…
I no sooner make a prediction
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/comment/190219/
but what the ink is drying on Drudge.
Is the entire world lurking here?
Yanbu is doubling exports of refined products… as soon as the refinery can be built.
————
KSA’s destiny is to refine heavy, sour crude at world scale refineries beyond the reach of the Strait. The alternative is to accept monopsony conditions — and take a brutal haircut.
Perhaps the best name for 1861-65 would be “The War For Southron Independence”.
As pointed out by Walter E. Williams, the conflict was not a “civil war” which is one in which one faction or the other tries to take over the established government. No such thing happened.
Certain states tried to sever their existing relationship and establish another among themselves. By definition, that is a war for independence.
Now if you are of mind that independence cannot be allowed for those who own slaves, that is your perogative. But you do make an ass of yourself if you insist that your beliefs determine the nature of any given conflict. Said nature is what it is regardless of how you view things.
Some commentary here reminds me of those who proclaimed that “there were no heros in Vietnam”. As if the lack of public adulation by those who were not there determined the conduct of those who were—–and did so ex post facto to boot.
Did you ever stop to think that if the North had been properly comitted to the abolition of slavery then the Congress could have acknowledged the right of secession and extended diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, contingent upon the CSA altering its constitution and effecting prompt emancipation?
Offer might not have been taken but does anybody deny that it should have been made? Hmmm?
If such an offer had been made and then rejected, then the legislation declaring
the confederate states to be in ” a state of rebellion and insurrection” would have had better standing and the war would have been more astutely conducted. (IE Grant and Sherman would have been put in charge much sooner) As it was, that legislation was only useful in granting Lincoln the Constitional Authority
that he used to insure no Fifth Column disrupted his rear.
What was really the damnyankees worst trangression? Saying that they were “saving the union”. A Federal Union cannot, say again, CANNOT be preserved by force of arms against constituent members who wish to take their leave. Secession is a natural right. Failure to recognize htis and act accordingly is like have the government outlaw divorce and then pretending that what is left remains a marriage. We have managed to maintain a reasonable version of a federal system of governance but we have NOT had a Federal Union since early 1861. Nor is a restoration of one anywhere on the horizion. I rather imagine that the next attempt to form one will have to be in another solar system. And without that useful tool—–Federal Union—–at our disposal, the practice of involuntary servitude in one form or the other is given legal cover instead of having been eliminated as was imagined.
Read ‘em and weep. The wrong side won and we gotta live with that.
I’m not sure these numbers are accurate but it would go to explain how they haven’t been able to pick one winner out of the crop.
The percentage of each past president’s cabinet who had worked
in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.
You know what the private business sector is a real-life business, not a
government job. Here are the percentages.
T. Roosevelt……………….. 38%
Taft……………………………. 40%
Wilson ……………………… 52%
Harding……………………… 49%
Coolidge……………………. 48%
Hoover………………………. 42%
F. Roosevelt………………. 50%
Truman……………………… 50%
Eisenhower……………. …. 57%
Kennedy……………………. 30%
Johnson…………………….. 47%
Nixon………………………… 53%
Ford………………………….. 42%
Carter……………………….. 32%
Reagan……………………… 56%
GH Bush……………………. 51%
Clinton ……………………. 39%
GW Bush…………………… 55%
Obama………………… 8%
This helps to explain the incompetence of this administration:
only 8% of them have ever worked in private business!
The final bill of federal failed green investments may come to about 6.5 billion.
http://conservativeamericaonline.blogspot.com/2012/01/solyndra-is-just-tip-of-iceberg.html
The feds are wrong to think that solar or wind can handle base load demand any time soon–or even at all.
The worst part of these investments is that it puts federal investments in high tech in a bad light. You can tell because Viktor (not that Victor) our resident fsb/kgb guy carelessly uses the moment to attack US federal spending on R&D.
Why careless? Viktor is a Putin guy. Putin is a spy guy. Putin doesn’t believe in original Russian R&D like Medvenev. Putin believes that the job of inventing stuff belongs to the West. The job of Russia and China is to steal the tech. So if the USA doesn’t invent–who will the Russians steal from? The Chinese?
Perhaps.
Dr. Jiang Mianheng, son of China’s former leader Jiang Zemin, led a thorium delegation in non-disclosure talks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn. They have taken the plans for thorium plants there (legally) and promised to develop thorium reactors in a decade and defend any IP they develop.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/watch-replay-of-nuclears-future-with-dash-of-rare-earth-political-intrigue/11586
Estimates coming from both Chinese and US scientists are that the cost of developing thorium reactors is about 1 billion.
This is where the research dollars should be going–from where ever.
This thing is going to happen. The question is who will do it and also how fast it will happen.
The other big thing this year is the work of Joule. If they succeed, they will revolutionize oil production. (A Russian company is already invested in Joule.)
It would be nice if the USA could think about this stuff in national terms.
on civil war matters, imho there has been a lot of role shifting lately.
It think it helpful to recall that the democrats at their best are all about unlimited resources, while the republicans at their best are about limited government.
Fisk overload on aisle 58…
WHY IN THE WORLD should we have to listen to the blather from those who by their argumentation sustain slavery: humans owning humans as chattel?
And their etch-a-sketch ‘memories’/ alternate histories?
Dave NOTHING you’ve posted stands unrebuked.
Any contra-Federal schism founded upon the economics of oppression lacks all morality.
Whereas the Colonials wanted to be freed from absolutism; the Confederate leadership wanted to rupture the Union — because Lincoln was elected — nothing more and nothing less.
THAT was the trigger.
Lincoln espoused nothing not in the Cooper Union Address; which you can bet every Southern revisionist dares not read. For in that tract the ENTIRE Southern argument is torn to shreds.
——-
If Dave’s ‘logic’ holds sway then the ENTIRE flow of American politics would be to ape Europe; a land of chronic warfare and suffering due to endless splintering and factions.
The Southern Cause did not use the Congress or the Court — it went to arms.
By comparison the North, losing at the bar: Dred Scott, endured four years of Buchanan without bloodshed. In this case the injuries were REAL — as against the IMAGINED injuries the containment of slavery (per Congressional laws enacted up through 1856) MIGHT eventuate.
( A fuller list of said Acts is in Lincoln’s speech. )
The NIGHTMARE of the enslavers: the status quo ante would be returned to. (!)
The industrial revolution was already evident in the railroad. BTW, they were booming ever since the late 1830′s — with design stability achieved by 1844ish. That’s a full generation of massive railroad expansion. During the Civil War NO NEW MAJOR EXPANSION occurred. All resources went to short haul links to the fronts ( military railroads ) and endless repairs. ( Civil War era track was IRON, not steel; which hardly lasted in heavy use. ( Carnegie left the Pennsylvania Railroad to manufacture Bessemer steel rails — thus creating the modern system seen worldwide.)
The rise of steam and heavy manufactures spelled the doom of the plantation.
We’ve always had the best Congress that money can buy — and the enslavers realized that northern wealth would grow so great that they’d no longer hold all of the (cash) cards.
The unremarked nature of antebellum America was that the southern exporters had hard currency receipts — whilst the northern crowd was importing capital at a staggering tempo.
And the only ‘capital’ that counted were the victims of slavery.
——–
Anyone standing up for slavery is making an amoral stand with and for every tyrant that ever came down the pike.
In their rebellion the only freedom they wanted was the right to extend and embellish their slave empire. It’s the ONLY thing separating the parties.
Its immorality is the soul of the Confederacy.
———-
The dreams of enslaving hunks of Mexico and the Caribbean make the enterprise all the more odious.
———-
As for Conservative Americans: they recognize that the defense of the Confederacy is and always has been the role of the Democrat Party.
Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, Buchanan — Democrats — and slave holders — all.
The KKK spent ALL of its formative years lynching Negroes and Republicans. This later morphed into murdering Jews and Catholics. That’ll give you some idea who could NEVER be accepted into their ranks.
Conflating Republicans and the KKK is like conflating the JDL and the SS.
( Of note is the very muslim attempt to turn Jews into Nazis — so we see the same bizarro agitprop thrown at us in the present day.)
———-
I must point out that the NYT agitprop engine is in full moonbat mode at this time.
Naturally enough they’ve managed to print an anti-Lincoln ( anti-Republican ) screed — as a stick in the eye of irate posters….
Having MOBYS trash the BC thread stream with pro-slavery bile: it’s a 2 fer!
———-
ANYONE taking such a line === Democrat Party hack. For that is the Party line from 1860 right down to today. After all, the NYT is a Democrat house organ — and so who’s publishing such screeds?
It answers itself.
Wow. Thanks, blert. My scaredness for America has …..evaporated.
56. stevesmith
How can you guys worry about everyday stuff like the world economy, civil wars and President Obama when Green Bay gets defeated by a team from New York??
I didn’t like that either, and I’m a Pats fan. It’s just not right.
**********
I do want to say that the thread sub-topics here at BC defy logic. Half the fun is in seeing where they go.
@51,52,53 Viktor (not that Victor), @58. Dave
Excellent posts, better than anything I could write. I enjoyed reading them.
I am certainly not a southern nostalgist nor a Democrat. As Viktor and Dave both describe the core issue here is the right to secede from an overbearing federal government that has broken free from all constitutional constraints. As Dave wrote so eloquently, refusing to allow divorce doesn’t imply marriage, and I would add that refusing to allow secession is a form of enslavement. All this began with the civil war and Lincoln’s reign, so in a sense all you Ron Paul hating, rape of the south loving institutional Republicans are no better than Jefferson Davis.
As far as these ongoing institutional republican charges of “thread jacking”, Blert made 6 posts on this thread. But it isn’t his thread jacking that bothers me, it is his hypocrisy.
“Both sides here therefore should probably tone down the rhetoric.”
You’re correct. The War of Secession ( I prefer that term because that is exactly what it was) is long over. Today the South produces more cotton then ever. Without a slave in sight. Unless you wish to count NCAA Div. 1 Basketball players.
Slavery was a dead issue, regardless of the outcome of the War of Secession. Machines could do the work of slaves more efficiently and more economically. They do so today.
There was no single reason for the War of Secession. The North had reasons, the South had reasons. Those reasons do overlap. Seen thru the prism of set theory, one of the intersections was slavery. The north consider it immoral to own people. The South didn’t consider slaves ‘people’. Another was the 10th amendment. The North considered the federal government paramount. The South saw it as a necessary evil. Another was fiscal. Northern industrialist looked upon the slaves as a cheap labor pool, one that could be stolen with a little effort.
As a point of fact Southern Senators offered to sell their slaves to the North. That would have allowed the northern States to put their money where their mouths were and free those same slaves. It would have cost way less then the war.
I doubt that it would have changed the drive to secession.
Anyway, from the POV of the rest of the world, the wrong side won. If Chamberlain and Melcher miss their moment of glory and Little Round Top falls, the Yankees lose Gettysburg and the war (regardless of name) is over. Then there are two nations in America. That means the Dis-united States do not intervene in Europe and the Kaiser wins wW1. That means no WW2 and possibly no Stalin or Hitler. It means no American hegemony 150 years later.
Has someone been laying down with dogs?
Or it could be that the Johnny Rebs and the Yankees never really liked each other. Go to New England with my accent and see what I mean.
65. stoicheion
It means no American hegemony 150 years later.
……..
Therefor the dabbling of the fsb/kgb on the civil war thread.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
64. ConfederateH
@51,52,53 Viktor (not that Victor)
……………
64. ConfederateH — Now Viktor (not that Victor) is beginning to look like your boss.
Refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act…
This sounds a lot like the Northern states refusal to “cooperate” in the enforcement of immigration law. So the Yankees will fall back on extra-constitutional means to subvert law and public order.
According to the Oligarchy of the Left and La Raza (the noble Übermenschen):
Mexicans = African Slaves
Belief in this lie is enabled by the same hatred and racism that has been the Democrat Party for 150 years and justifies flaunting the rule of law and makes a nice cover for the looting of America. If there isn’t another revolution to ensure freedom from tyrants there ought to be.
Winning. Charlie Sheen and Barak Obama are using similar playbooks.
If you want to argue Spengler, go and argue Spengler.
I am going to start posting my lost love letters on here to improve the signal to BS ratio.
67. Cowboy
Or it could be that the Johnny Rebs and the Yankees never really liked each other. Go to New England with my accent and see what I mean.
…………….
Actual Yankees,–as in Americans whose ancestors actually fought in the civil war — are mostly a defeated lot. They were defeated –not by southerners but rather by newer immigrants to the country.
Similar things are happening in California today.
Another American was killed in LA by an illegal alien.
Over at Whiskey’s Place, Whiskey does a good job of explaining the circumstances around death of the American at the hands of an illegal alien serial killer and the death the American Dream in California–& the emergence of the Dream Act.
http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/2012/01/orange-countys-illegal-alien-serial.html
(You hear similar things from Victor Davis Hanson.)
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