Actually, the governments are not interested in eliminating monopolies; rather, they try to create conditions to enable producers to force monopoly prices on the market.--von Mises Happy Earth Day, a creepy secular day after Easter. An excellent dinner at Jeff and Amy's. Nice time. The scene-setting in GoT is clever and suspenseful, but maddening. Chris was more sore yesterday. Ned has a plan for me and the writing project. Christina bought Liz' brunch yesterday and Liz was going out to buy a stranger dinner. I'm not sure how it worked out--socialism always working out better with people you know. Almost 100 students at the UK’s top universities have requested to change their gender on official records. The British art historian Ernst Gombrich believed that, although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting. ‘However we analyse the difference between the regular and the irregular,’ he wrote in The Sense of Order (1979), ‘we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.’ Too much order, we lose interest. Too much disorder, and there’s nothing to be interested in. Among the Class of 2018, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of $29,800, including both private and federal debt. Meanwhile, 14% of their parents took out an average of $35,600 in federal Parent PLUS loans. Americans owe over $1.56 trillion in student loan debt, spread out among about 45 million borrowers. That’s about $521 billion more than the total U.S. credit card debt. 11.5% of student loans are 90 days or more delinquent or are in default.
Average monthly student loan payment (among those not in deferment): $393.What makes the statistics even more alarming is that only about 15 percent of student debt is private debt. Most of the money borrowed by students was borrowed from the deep pockets of the government.
Even more than a quarter of a century from now, the Department of Energy forecasts that fossil fuels will still be the dominant energy source, providing 79 percent of our energy needs in 2050. So, despite former President Obama’s frequent dismissals of oil and fossil fuels as “energy sources of the past,” government forecasts tell a much different story of a hydrocarbon-based energy future where fossil fuels will serve as the dominant energy source to power our vehicles, heat and light our homes, and fuel the growing economy.
Further, Obama’s energy policies focused on forcing U.S. taxpayers to “invest” in politically favored “energy sources of the future” – renewables like solar and wind — instead of expanding production of oil, natural gas, and coal. But again, government data tell a much different story. Even after billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy, all renewables together (including hydroelectric power, biomass, solar, and wind) last year provided only 11.4 percent of America’s energy, which was just slightly greater than the 9.3 percent share that renewables provided in 1949, nearly 70 years ago – that’s not a lot of progress for the politically popular but very expensive renewables.
When it comes to solar and wind, those two energy sources combined provided only 3.2 percent of America’s energy in 2017 – an almost insignificant amount, especially wind’s contribution of less than 0.8 percent, or just a little more than a rounding error in the overall energy picture. Even in 2050, all renewables together will provide only 14.9 percent of our nation’s energy – not that much higher than renewable’s 9.3 percent share of energy in 1949! (from Perry)
Crichton on Environmentalism
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism......
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die.....
From REMARKS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB
by Michael Crichton - San Francisco - September 15, 2003
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