Friday Follies

It's a mixed bag, today.  The only unifying theme is the folly.

Windmills paid subsidies not to generate power

We all know that wind power is unreliable - after all, anyone can see that windmills don't generate electricity when the wind doesn't blow.  Interestingly, they don't generate electricity when the wind does blow:

From the Sunday Times (not online; via commenters)

Wind farm operators in Scotland were paid nearly £900,000 to keep their turbines idle for a night because the National Grid did not need the power.

The payments, up to 20 times the value of the power the wind farms would have produced, were offered by the National Grid because it urgently needed to reduce electricity entering the system.
It was oversupplied with power on a wet and blustery night last month when demand for electricity was low.

It's obvious that the Underpants Gnomes are in charge of the green power programs:

1. Provide subsidies of 20x the already 5x inflated cost of the power.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Environmentalists are Sad Pandas

The public just isn't buying the ZOMG-thermageddon!!!1! schtick.  This makes environmentalists sad.

In recent years, public apathy and a political impasse on global warming has led some to a grim resignation — society might not take serious action on climate change until catastrophic events force our hand. For example, in 2009, Canadian scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon said, "I am convinced that we won't really address the climate change problem until it produces some major shocks or instabilities that mobilize broad populations."

Last week, Robert Stavins, director of Harvard’s Environmental Economics Program, expressed a similar view, at least as it relates to the United States. In an interview with Bloomberg news, Stavins remarked that, “It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction."

Ya know, maybe if some of your ZOMG predictions ever came, you know, true - maybe you'd get some buy-in.  Just sayin'.  Oh, and quit playing shell games to hide the decline.

Now that's a catastrophe!

Let them eat kittens:

Just a few pages into the book, Herzog discusses a frantic phone call he received from a friend. This friend had heard, through the grapevine, that Herzog was adopting kittens from animal shelters and feeding them to his son’s pet boa constrictor. Herzog was appalled–he would never do any such thing, he told his friend, an avowed animal rights advocate.

But then, he started thinking about it. “Is having a pet that gets its daily ration of meat from a can morally preferable to living with a snake? And are there circumstances in which feeding kittens to boa constrictors might actually be morally acceptable?”

Dude, Lissa is going to come and kick your ass.

MSM: It's OK if a liberal president assassinates people

Duh. Just don't you rednecky Texans think you can do it.  That's totally different.

Boy, if they keep this sort of thing up, someone might start saying they're biased or something.  Oh, wait.

MSM: The Veterans are all loonier than a Canadian Dollar

Blackfive takes them to the woodshed.  My take:

That said, this article by Luke Mogelson in the New York Times Magazine (via PJ Tatler) entitled “The Beast In The Heart Of Every Fighting Man” is a travesty.  It’s subhead gives you a clue why:

The case against American soldiers accused of murdering Afghan civilians turns on the idea of a rogue unit. But what if the killings are a symptom of a deeper problem?

Let's see now:

The case against American soldiersTV News teams accused of murdering Afghan civilians knowingly airing forged documents during an election campaign turns on the idea of a rogue unit. But what if the killings are a symptom of a deeper problem?

There, I fixed it for you. Boy, if they keep this sort of thing up, someone might start saying they're biased or something. Oh, wait.

SWPL Progressive programs make SWPL cities even whiter

I guess that makes sense, in a way.

Portland should change its motto from “the city that works” to “the city that’s white.” Already the whitest big city in America in 2000, the city has gotten whiter still as poor people have been pushed from the inner city into the suburbs, as shown in this stunning series of maps.

The Antiplanner has covered this issue before, but it is worth repeating, partly because of The Oregonian‘s excellent coverage yesterday and partly because of what The Oregonian didn’t say. As Portland’s only daily paper pointed out, the city did little to help low-income minorities and did many things that hurt.

Seems their SWPL Light Rail system was so hideously expensive that they had to cut all the bus service to minority neighborhoods.  And they had to cut school funding in the inner city.  But remember, these people are all smarter and nicer than you or I.  It's "Smart Growth", don't 'cha know?