Canada Stats
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign, calling him an obstacle to a two-state solution.
Like a neighbor wandering into your house and rearranging your furniture.
Monsieur Spade
From a review of Monsieur Spade, a series on Prime:
It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:
Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?
Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.
Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?
Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.
Deviation
In an interview Friday, the BBC called the White House 'cowardly.'
Non-Profits Are Their Own Reward
The United Network for Organ Sharing is a non-profit scientific and educational organization that administers the only Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network in the United States. It was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984.
This chart shows the average change in electricity prices over the last decade. Electric rates remained relatively flat in the seven years before President Biden took office, rising 5% thanks to cheap natural gas. Yet since January 2021 electricity prices have soared 29.4%—about 50% more than overall inflation. Big numbers.
Electricity prices have increased 13 times faster under Biden than across the previous seven years. 13 times. Big numbers.
The world would be so much safer if the leaders simply prioritized protecting their citizens. And smarter. It would be nice if they were smarter.Most of it is a result of the left’s climate agenda, and the price increases will get worse. And what if Israel attacks Iran?
Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction. --CEO of NPR
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Poverty is no mystery. Poverty has been, and remains, man’s standard dish throughout history in most places in the world. Affluence is the mystery. Why is it that a small portion of the world’s population for only a tiny part of its history is exempt from the fate that has befallen the rest of the world?--williams****
The political model for make-work programs is FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which paid Americans to work when nearly one in four were jobless. The U.S. now has a labor shortage, but the Biden Administration wants to mobilize more than 20,000 initially for something called the 'Climate Corps'—and some 50,000 by 2031. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey want the Climate Corps to employ 1.5 million over five years.****
The Biden tax hikes would primarily fall on capital income, leading to less domestic investment, fewer jobs, and slower economic growth. According to estimates from the Tax Foundation, the budget proposal would reduce long‐run GDP by 2.2 percent, hurt wages, and eliminate 788,000 jobs. This is likely a significant understatement of the negative economic effects. The analysis notes that the budget’s proposals will make America an international outlier on individual and corporate taxes, making the U.S. a less attractive investment.
Deep Thinking Economists
Sunday/Thomas
Today's gospel is the "Doubting Thomas" gospel. It could be a short story. It is an insight that unfortunately has become a cliché.
Demand has been flat for fifteen years, but now looks about to surge. From the Times, the Times!:
To meet spiking demand, utilities in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia are proposing to build dozens of power plants over the next 15 years that would burn natural gas. In Kansas, one utility has postponed the retirement of a coal plant to help power a giant electric-car battery factory.
Some utilities say they need additional fossil fuel capacity because cleaner alternatives like wind or solar power aren’t growing fast enough and can be bogged down by delayed permits and snarled supply chains. While a data center can be built in just one year, it can take five years or longer to connect renewable energy projects to the grid and a decade to build some of the long-distance power lines they require. Utilities also note that data centers and factories need power 24 hours a day, something wind and solar can’t do alone.
Today, the pledge date of the Paris Climate Agreement, 2026, is only two years away, and we’re barely halfway toward the goal. Moreover, most of the supposed “progress” has been achieved by closing coal power plants and replacing them with natural gas, a process that is now nearly complete. There are almost no coal plants left to close. And now electricity demand is rising and utilities are looking to build more natural gas plants. The 2026 pledge will never be achieved.
And the 2030 pledge is even more ridiculous.
On Monday, Amin Nasser, the CEO of Saudi Aramco — the world’s largest oil company — gave a speech in Houston where he said a bunch of obvious things that somehow other oil executives (from companies based in the U.S. and Europe) are unable to say. The speech was widely reported. Here is one report from CBC.
Excerpt: The head of the world's largest energy company on Monday urged the world to accept the "hard realities" that oil and natural gas will be around for a long time to come and consumption of both sources of energy is likely to grow for at least the next decade or two. . . . "We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions," he said. . . . "All this strengthens the view that peak oil and gas is unlikely for some time to come, let alone 2030," he said. "No one is betting the farm on that."
Here is a chart from page 2-29 of EPA’s Report showing trends in U.S. GHG emissions by economic sectors:
As you can see, the large majority of the decreases in emissions achieved since 2005 have been in the electric power sector.
The preachers who were the poor boy’s murderers crowded round him at the gallows, and… insulted heaven with prayers more blasphemous than anything he had uttered.
It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
Easter/Sunday
Easter is the essential Christian event. Every aspect of the Christian church hinges on Christ's resurrection.
The gospel is filled with little particulars (the woman hesitant to enter the tomb, Peter being outrun to the tomb, the meticulous arrangement of the burial cloths, the assumption that the body was stolen--after the assumption by the Pharisees that the apostles would steal it)--all giving misdirection and specificity to what becomes the philosophical earthquake of all time. And, of course, another biblical irony: The first to arrive, the women, could not be legal witnesses.
Yet how does this all hinge? Hearsay? The interpretation of a sacred book? Amulets and magic rites? No. Amazingly it hinges on us.
By the time Christ rises, we know all the players. We even have some insights about them. They are not revolutionaries, not mystics and, while seemingly sincere, they are not special. They are relatively normal working folks with responsibilities and, probably, annoyed families. As seen by their behavior during the Passion, they are not fully aware of what is happening. Nor are they particularly brave. Yet, after this crisis where their leader is tortured and killed, they somehow emerge as philosophers and martyrs. They all, to a man, experience a mind-changing, life-changing event. Scattered and leaderless they raise a religious movement that challenges everything in its time and, eventually, forces mighty Rome to adapt.
Christ performed the great, unarguable miracle. It was the behavior of men, people, who confirmed and developed it. No leap of faith was necessary. They were convinced and changed. Then they convinced and changed the world.
Quick Hits
Is Beyonce's new album cultural appropriation?
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The growth of China’s agricultural subsidies is incredible: now at $300bn per year, according to the OECD. The graph, which as usual I could not paste, is astounding