More brilliance from Washington

President Biden is going to require federal workers to travel via rail and electric vehicles, which leaves me sort of torn.  I'm bummed because it means he's going to unilaterally increase the cost of government and our taxes, but on the bright side, maybe it means the government won't be able to do as much.

Seriously, what he's really said is to rent electrics only when they are cost competitive, which means of course "never".  A seemingly bright spot, however, is that it appears that they'll be required to use rail for trips of less than 250 miles.  Since most of the country is nowhere near an Amtrak line, does that mean that people won't have to hear the nine more terrifying words in the English language:

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

Natch, I'm guessing that there's a way around that one, too.  So congratulations to President Biden on yet another meaningless executive order that will do nothing to help the environment or improve how goverment works.

And I need to say it; we miss you, Ronald Reagan.

Somehow it reminds me of Anne Frank

Harvard University has apparently asked campus rabbis to hide their menorahs to avoid embarrassment if on-campus supporters of Hamas Nazis should decide to destroy them.  Pro tip for the geniuses on the Charles River; if Jews on campus are forced to act like Anne Frank's family, you're doing it wrong.

Side note is that I'm not hearing reports of things like this in states like Texas and Florida.  Wonder why that is.

Two Updates: First, it appears that two Ivy League college presidents who were not able to figure out that the mass murder and gang rape of innocents was wrong....did so with the guidance of an elite law firm.  In other hilarious (and sad) news, the head of the NAA(L)CP, Derrick Johnson, is arguing that it is somehow "racist" to hold Hahvid President Gay to account for her plagiarism and anti-Semitic comments.

Honestly, it boggles the mind how supposedly "educated" and "elite" people have so much trouble figuring out that whether gang rape and murder of innocents is wrong is not a matter of "context".  If they don't clue in, they will hopefully learn the hard way that whether the taxpayer funds their institutions is put into the "context" of tolerating vile anti-Semitic slurs at their institutions.

A great way to help the environment

This column by Powerline suggests to me that there is a great way of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions; allow greater production of fossil fuels in the U.S. and enact a 10% revenue tariff.  How does this work?

Simple.  If you look at the graphs and do a little bit of arithmetic, you'll see that the Chinese release about 3x the greenhouse gases per dollar of GDP than does the United States, and a great part of this is because it's still profitable for them to use very inefficient ways of producing energy--and this is not entirely because of their dependence on coal, because using coal in itself only releases 70% more greenhouse gases than using natural gas.

Drilling in the U.S. reduces our own production costs, and that reduces any advantages that shoddy Chinese goods have over those domestically produced.  More importantly, you've got the principle seen with the 1991 increase on wine taxes; all of a sudden, it became unprofitable to produce "bum wines" (and wine coolers), and the wine industry in the U.S. began to target wine for quality instead of quantity.  

The same thing goes with other products, and I suspect that a lot of the factories that currently make shoddy products are among them.  You can't keep fueling your factory with coal if you don't have sales to buy the coal, after all. 

Looks like the solution for our future is....really....a lot of the policies of the past.

More news regarding Ukraine

A U.S. intelligence assessment suggests that Russia has lost up to 87% of the ground infantry forces they possessed, up to 315,000 men, as casualties (fatalities or serious injuries).   In other words, the Russian army is on the ropes, and a good infusion of minesweeping equipment, aircraft, and long range artillery will likely push their war effort in Ukraine off a cliff, and we have yet another place where Ukrainian estimates of Russian losses are actually pretty close--or perhaps even a bit lower than the reality.

Given that Russia causes call kinds of mayhem through their clients in the Wagner Group in Africa and Syria, through Belarus, through the "Transnistria" region in Moldova, through Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthi in the Middle East, and of course with the "little green men" and their clients in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and more, I can think of few better investments for our country than to push their war effort over the edge.  Hopefully it causes Russia to take one more casualty, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin.  Putin delenda est!

Here's my question

After a 108-14 thrashing by North Dakota State, fans are wondering...really...about the loser's stand on homosexuality?  Really?  

My take is simpler; North Dakota State is a Division 1 school, and Oak Hills is a Bible college with an enrollment of 100 students.  Who on earth thought that this was going to be a good game?  I realize that there is a perceived need to play something like 30 games each season, and you've got to line up some patsies if you want to get to the NIT or NCAA tournament, but seriously?  Does no one at NDSU have a conscience and realize that playing kids off the JV teams at their high schools is a great way of getting people hurt?

In other brillance, people are putting charging coils into roadbeds with the goal of charging electric golf carts cars.  Now as an electrical engineer who used to belong to the IEEE, I remember that some IEEE societies have annual issues on the state of science regarding low level electromagnetic fields, especially those from cell phones and power transmission lines.  So I'm not exactly sure why anyone thinks this is a good idea; I am personally a skeptic about the likelihood of cancers being induced by low level non-ionizing radiation, but it just seems to be begging for trouble to do this.

 

Hideous acts from the DOJ

The DOJ is suing the state of Tennesssee for making it a felony to be a prostitute while HIV positive, arguing somehow that being HIV positive is just a disability (which I guess it is), and not a lethal threat to those who might have sex with an HIV positive prostitute.  They are actually arguing that  you need to do a complicated study to prove that HIV can be a death sentence, something I've known...oh, about since I was studying geometry in high school.

Meanwhile, the CDC reports that annual HIV infections are about 32000 in the U.S., and annual deaths with HIV are about 20,000.  Interestingly, I did not see clear indications of what proportion of those deaths were significantly, or primarily, from HIV, but it's still pretty likely that for a lot of those who contract it, HIV is indeed a death sentence. I would guess that COVID hit those with immune weaknesses pretty hard, to put it mildly.

More and more, when I see the antics of our public servants, an old line from a movie whose name I forget comes to mind:  "I don't like you because you're trying to get me killed."  

Well said

Hats off to John Schroeder's column on Hugh Hewitt's website about how universities are horribly failing their athletes.  I've personally been horrified as I've seen that too many former football and basketball players are given "Cadillac tastes" with the adulation of students and fans, along with training tables and the like, and then proceed to have a "Chevy budget" because their degrees, if any, really don't qualify them for a good paying job.

And for what it's worth, this hits minorities hardest, as I remember seeing that at some schools, white football players graduate about 80% of the time, while black players graduate 50% of the time.  I don't believe that schools are doing minority athletes any favors with this system.

Time to get colleges out of the pro sports business, and back into the education business.

A mathematical confession from Moscow

Russian dictator and thug Vladimir Putin has ordered that the size of the Russian army be increased by 170,000 men, following  an earlier boost of 137,000 men.  Now the thing that is very striking is that the boosts ordered are about the same as Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties (currently about 330,000), and it's not clear whether this increased recruitment/conscription even includes those "soldiers" "recruited" from Russian prisons.

I've always viewed the Ukrainian estimates of Russian losses to be, shall we say, probably a bit embellished, but with this inadvertent confession by the former KGB officer, I'm starting to think that it's startlingly accurate or maybe even a bit conservative.  And in that light, it's worth noting that the number of Russian casualties is rapidly getting to be about twice the size of the original invasion force, and is closing in on the number of casualties the U.S. experienced during all of World War Two, where we spearheaded the defeat of three world powers.  The only war where the U.S. clearly experienced worse casualties is now....the Civil War.

I'm praying that soon, thinking Russians realize the extent of this disaster and add one more person to the casualty list, and then withdraw from a place they never should have been in the first place.