Biden’s Incoherent Energy Policy

Biden ran on a loud promise that America would stop using fossil fuels. He also claims to be a big proponent of protecting human rights. Now this:

Biden yesterday lifted oil sanctions on Venezuela, which the U.S. State Department says is a dictatorship that uses the military and violent gangs to engage in “extrajudicial killings,” “forced disappearances,” and “torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” Biden publicly begged the Saudi government to produce more oil during the summer and two weeks ago granted immunity to the prime minister, a son of the king, and a man who US and foreign intelligence services say killed a Washington Post reporter. And, in early June, Biden issued an emergency order for the U.S. to continue importing Chinese solar panels and products from Xinjiang province, where the U.S. State Department says the government is committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims.

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Michael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Michael Shellenberger. The first third of the interview has been released. I highly recommend watching/listening/reading it. Shellenberger once identified as a liberal, but now he declares himself an independent, taking good ideas wherever he finds them and rejecting bad ideas. I agree with much of what he has to say in this part of the interview. Here is an excerpt from the interview where Shellenberger argues that a big part of our problem is nihilism:

Michael: I'm really interested in defending the pillars of civilization and the pillars of civilization are, as I see it, cheap, abundant energy, law and order, and meritocracy. My first book, Apocalypse Never, addresses the attack on abundant and cheap energy. San Fransicko describes the attack on law and order and meritocracy. You start attacking those pillars of civilization and you just don't have a civilization left anymore

Tucker: Can you repeat those?

Michael: Cheap energy, law and order, and meritocracy. All three are under attack in a really systematic way. This is why I find myself as somebody that's traditionally been on the left and is now independent. I see what conservatives are doing and the role of conservatives as important. They have the role of defending civilization. The role of the left has always been to demand change and push for change. And in some cases, I support that. But, right now, you see that the left has gone so far that even more moderate liberals have been radicalized and are undermining the bases of our civilization.

Tucker: But the alternative to civilization — and I've seen glimpses of it a couple of times — is so horrifying. It’s the total domination of the week by the strong. A 15-year-old with an automatic rifle can rape, can do whatever he wants, and you have no power. We spent millennia trying to build an alternative to that and we now have it. Why would you ever want to revert to the 15-year-old with the automatic weapon being in charge?

Michael: That's maybe the most important question of our time. And it's not an academic question.

Tucker: It’s a very practical question! And there are parts of the world where there's no civilization. I have personally seen them so I know. You can just buy a plane ticket and go there if you're interested. Why would anybody want that?

Michael: That is a huge question. I think one question is, “Do the people who are undermining civilization really want that? Do they know what they want?” To some extent, I think they do. But where all of my work has led me, and this is where my third book is going, is that what we're dealing with — and it's a bit of jargon, but I can't figure out how else to say it — a crisis of nihilism, meaning that as people stop believing in traditional religion, as people stop believing in God, they start to adopt new religions.

Nihilism has two meanings that are related. The first is that life has no purpose or value. We're just like animals. We're born, we reproduce, and we die. There's no point to any of it. And so it doesn't really matter what you do. You're not going to be judged at the end of your life to determine whether you go to heaven or hell. So that's the first nihilism. But then this turns people toward a kind of will-to-power. It turns into a desire to feel powerful, which itself is just a kind of hedonism when you get right down to it.... And it’s not just from the radical activists. We see it among elite media basically saying, “Unless we go back to pre-industrial energy sources, we're going to end up in a climate apocalypse.” They've constructed a new apocalyptic religion out of nihilism. I think that is what's driving this crisis of civilization. It’s a crisis of nihilism that arguably began a couple of hundred years ago....

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

About the Nord Stream Pipeline

Matt Taibbi comments on the Nord Stream Pipelines:

The massive dual Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany were struck by highly suspicious twin underwater explosions, causing a giant environmental disaster and deepening an already devastating European energy crisis. Reactions from Russian, European, and especially American political protagonists ranged from merely unbelievable to abjectly comic. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tsk-tsked that some unknown not-American actor must have committed a “deliberate act.” Not since Shaggy came out with the one-hit-wonder It Wasn’t Me in 1999, or O.J. launched his hunt for the real killers, has American popular culture seen a less convincing cover story. U.S. officials were long ago on record promising to cut off the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine, with Joe Biden saying in February, “We will bring an end to it.” When asked how, Biden coyly said, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” The operation, no joke, came in the same week NATO tweeted that ongoing exercises presented “opportunities to test new unmanned systems at sea” (see TWEET HISTORY MAY REMEMBER). A rapid-fire tweet by former Polish Foreign Minister saying, “Thank you, USA” was mysteriously taken down later in the week, inspiring trolls to tease that his hardcore interventionist wife Anne Applebaum made him do it. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits in the U.S. and the U.K. in impressive deadpan argued that Russia had sabotaged its own pipeline, its best and perhaps only source of leverage internationally. The U.K. Spectator for instance suggested Russia did it to “up the ante on the West.” Throughout, three boiling patches of methane, one a kilometer across, poured toxic gases into the atmosphere in an “unprecedented” climate disaster. Fortunately this worries almost no one, since we’re now currently preoccupied with an even bigger fear, of nuclear war.
From Aaron Mate:

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The Good Intentions of Innumerate Environmentalists

Well-intended innumerate people should not be in charge of government. Michael Schellenberger employs some down-to-earth math to show how pie-in-the-sky and how dangerous some well-meaning environmentalists are. Follow the full thread down to see how a lot of save-the-earth rhetoric is detached from reality because it is detached from the need for more nuclear power.

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Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well.  Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks.  Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.

[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes.  I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race."  I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman.  In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]

What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":

I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

Continue ReadingCiting Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer