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August 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Environmentalists’ Broken Toys: Running Against Harsh Reality

By on August 11th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/11/environmentalists-broken-toys/

We’ve recently written quite a bit about electric vehicles’ many flaws – the reasons to hate them, their evil nature, the entire EV con. But they’re not the only green plaything that’s being exposed for the debacle they are. Windmills are just as troubled.

“All over the world, rural people are reacting with fury at the encroachment of large wind and solar projects on their homes and neighborhoods,” writes energy author Robert Bryce.

Last month, “thousands of Druze residents in the Golan Heights,” says Bryce, “rioted to stop the installation of a large wind project on their traditional lands.” Before that, a wind project in Colombia was “canceled after it met fierce opposition from the indigenous Wayuu communities.”

Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of ​​solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.

Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Free Ron DeSantis What he needs at the Republican primary debate isn’t a reset but a return to his winning message of September 2022:Kimberley A. Strassel

By on August 11th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-ron-desantis-florida-president-candidate-disney-debate-gov-fa0e36c?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Ron DeSantis campaign continues to reset its reset. At some point it might consider that what it needs isn’t a reset but a reversal—a return to the Ron DeSantis of yore.

Last September Mr. DeSantis stood on a stage near Miami and gave a speech to remember. He spoke enthusiastically about the Florida model, ably connecting its successes to free-market conservative philosophy. The state’s thriving economy was a product of low taxes, modest government, the quick abandonment of unscientific Covid lockdowns. Its surplus was thanks to fiscal prudence and policies that expand the “economic pie.” Widespread school choice produced rising test scores; accountability in public universities kept tuition low. Support for law enforcement equaled public safety.

People were flocking to Florida because “common sense” and “rational” policies provided better roads, trustworthy elections, good jobs. His comments about critical race theory and gender ideology were framed in the broader context of the need to protect parental and employee rights. He used Disney to make a compelling distinction between “free enterprise” and subsidized “corporatism.” He invoked Ronald Reagan’s most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”—though the Floridian called to update them to take into account the modern bureaucratic state.

That Ron DeSantis came across as smart and optimistic, bold and absolutely in tune with needs of the “average” families he frequently mentioned. It’s the formula that six weeks later handed the Florida governor a landslide re-election victory, in which he won the rural vote, the suburban vote, even the urban vote, 62 of 67 counties and nearly every demographic. It’s the formula that made him the biggest threat to Donald Trump’s renomination.

Where’s that Ron DeSantis today?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Arc of Reform New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program. Christopher Rufo

By on August 11th, 2023

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-arc-of-reform?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

 The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Four: Lawlessness and Corruption Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 11th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-four-lawlessness-and-corruption/

Corruption and lawlessness destroy civilizations. The 20th-century American ability to curb both, at least on the everyday level, explains in part the American success story. But now?

On the street level, shoplifting is being redefined in blue cities and states as something like parity or equity, or some sort of Orwellian justified adjustment in income.

The attempt to enforce the law can be far more dangerous than breaking it. We have completely politicized the legal system on the violent end, using race and ethnicity as exemptions from full enforcement of statutes—exemptions that fall most heavily upon the inner-city people of color and poor.

Will the lawlessness continue, as carjacking, car-racing in intersections, smash-and-grab, and overt theft reach the suburbs? Are we more afraid of enforcing the law and being libeled as illiberal for it, or the lawbreaking itself that we cannot always any more avoid?

In Oakland, suburbanites of every race, along with inner-city blacks, now march on government to insist on refunding the police and enforcing the law? But is such a reawakening too little and too late, in the sense that industry, business, and the middle classes now choose instead to avoid the Oaklands of America, on the theory life is too short and dangerous to be martyred on the altar of ecumenicalism?

As Livy reminds us, the remedy for our vices is now deemed worse than the malady itself. Would an attorney general attempting to clean up the DOJ have to be hated and ostracized to succeed? Where and how would an FBI director even begin?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness? Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 11th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/10/who-will-say-no-more-to-the-current-madness/

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed.

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.

Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

In the hours after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany.

A Labour Party member, surrogate Arthur Greenwood, got up in the House of Commons to announce that he would be speaking for Labour on behalf of his ill party leader Clement Attlee.

Immediately Amery interrupted, shouting out, “Speak for England, Arthur!”

He was met with overwhelming applause and soon public acclamation.

After all, Amery was a political voice in the wilderness warning that neither his own party nor opposition Labour was speaking or acting for the real interest of the British people.

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