Expensive Green New Deal

 

The election is a referendum on the Green New Deal.  If fracking is outlawed, natural gas prices will triple, and gasoline prices will double or triple.  Do people really want to vote for $4.50 a gallon gasoline?  About 87% of US electricity generation isn't renewable.  About 63% is fossil fuels.  Do you really believe we can scrap and replace 63%, or 87%, of US electricity generation withing 15 years?  It would be impossibly expensive.

The US has gradually substituted natural gas for coal in electricity generation, based on fracking natural gas.  As a result, the US is the only major economic power to have declining CO2 emissions since the Kyoto Agreement.  Outlawing fracking will force us back to coal, or turn the lights off in the US.

Renewable energy is intermittent.  There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.  At the moment, the technology for storing energy from renewable sources to fill in for when they are not generating is both inefficient and prohibitively expensive.  The end result of strong ideology and weak engineering is California rolling blackouts.

The US is the only country that has met its goals for reducing carbon emissions.  The US did this by switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation.  The increase in natural gas came from fracking.  The Green New Deal eliminates fracking.

The Green New Deal will outlaw gasoline cars.  Less than 1% of US cars are battery driven now.  It will take a tremendous amount of investment to switch from gas stations to electric charging stations.California and New York already have versions of the Green New Deal.  Democrats have a history of running as moderates then switching to their real progressive positions once elected.  Leftists try to block every pipeline they can.

The bottom line is that you're smoking wacky tobaccy if you believe that Democrats won't implement major parts of the Green New Deal if elected. 

Do you expect the woke to be rational about their goals?  They have shown they have no rationality when it comes to canceling anyone who deviates even slightly from their ideology.  Do you think women are people who menstruate?  Wrong and unwoke!

Electoral College Blues

 Every presidential election since 1789 has been decided by the electoral college vote, except one, never the popular vote.  If you think it should be different, please use the procedures in Article V of the Constitution to ratify an amendment abolishing the electoral college and substituting the popular vote.  Good luck with that, by the way.  Ratification takes 3/4th of the state legislatures approving the amendment.  There's no way you can get the electoral college abolished by a Constitutional amendment, because small states won't ratify any such amendment.

Meanwhile you can be shocked, shocked, that Trump won the electoral college without winning a majority of popular votes, and won the presidency.  It's similar to your NFL team  gaining more yards but losing the game on points scored.  Shameful in both cases, right, even though the rules of the game were clear to everybody from the start.  Perhaps Democrats are too dumb to win presidential elections according to the Constitution.

Remedies for Facebook and Twitter Censorship

People say that companies like Facebook and Twitter can do business, and refuse to do business, with whoever they want, because they are private companies.  However, I don’t see much difference between refusing to serve customers because of their political views and refusing to do business with people because of their religious views.  I know all about refusing to sell to people because of their religious views, because it happened to my grandparents.  My Methodist grandmother bought a house in her name alone because my Jewish grandfather could not in the restricted neighborhood where the house was located.  The deed stated no Jews or blacks.  We needed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to stop such nonsense.  Perhaps we need a legislative solution to stop discrimination against people for their political views.

Facebook, Twitter and similar companies take advantage of an exemption in the copyright law that says they are not responsible for material on their site that violates copyrights because they don't exercise editorial control.  Since they supposedly exercise no editorial control, they are considered to be a platform, not a publisher.  I think that if they are blocking content for failure to meet their obviously political “community standards,” there is a good argument to be made that they are no longer a platform. They have become a publisher.  I think the law should be changed so that companies like Facebook and Twitter have a choice of not censoring content and having the exemption, or exercising control of content and losing the copyright exemption.  Platform censorship should be limited to the option of stopping people who advocate violence or spread explicit pornography.

If that’s too radical a change to pass Congress, I have two alternatives.  The milder legislative alternative is to force companies like Facebook and Twitter to publish a full explanation of their “community standards.” At the moment, there is no way anybody can know in advance what will offend My Lords Dorsey and Zuckerberg.  They should have to publish guidelines in advance so that users actually have a chance of skirting their censorship.   The companies also should be forced to give people whose posts are censored or whose accounts are suspended or banned an “Error Report” that shows the offending post(s) and explains what is wrong with them and how the user can correct them so that the user can avoid future censorship or being banned completely.  These “Error Reports” could also be used to push back against the censorship as extreme or completely arbitrary.  In other words, sunlight could be a good disinfectant for this censorship behavior.

The other solution I think would require an anti-trust suit and settlement.  Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are natural monopolies. Part of the convenience is that everyone is on the same platform, exchanging information, The monopoly part that needs to be broken up is who  selects what the user sees.

There is no technical reason that the only Facebook can select what you see. Technically, Facebook could be forced to share its data with third parties who could select what you see. Users could then choose who they wanted to select what they see. Facebook would still manage the platform and be able to place some ads based on customer data. Third parties selecting what the users see also could place some ads along with the content they show users.

Facebook would no longer be allowed to remove any content except on the grounds of content advocating violence or containing pornography. Users could choose which companies would select content for them. Competition should remove any need for government content regulation

The first company to get hit with this anti-trust settlement hopefully might scare the others straight.  This would represent a tremendous loss of value to the platform company.  They would no longer receive monopoly rents provided by exclusive content filtration.  Hopefully, the abuse of content filtration monopolies for political censorship would stop.

Time to End Democrats' Impunity

Now that the Midterm Elections are over, the Justice Department needs to end the impunity with which Democrats in Washington, DC, violate laws. It's time for equality before the law to really mean the law applies to Democrats as well as Republicans. It's time to indict Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Samantha Power and Susan Price for lying to the FBI when they said they knew nothing about Hillary Clinton's private email server. Subsequent evidence indicated they all helped set it up. If we can add mishandling classified information to the charges after all of the immunity granted to these people, we should. It's time to indict John Koskinen, former IRS Commissioner, for obstruction of justice and perjury, for saying that he couldn't find any record of Lois Lerner telling the IRS to harass Tea Party groups. Six almost simultaneous hard drive crashes and numerous overwritten backup tapes strain credulity to the breaking point. Lois Lerner needs to be indicted for disclosing taxpayer information to her friends in liberal PACs.

It's time to indict Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI. All of those text messages make a great case with just what's on the public record. It's time to indict Andrew McCabe for lying to the FBI. McCabe was fired for "lacking candor," which translates to lying to the FBI.

In other words, the Democrats should get the Mueller special counsel treatment. If General Mike Flynn can be forced to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, when the agents who interviewed him didn't think Flynn was lying, then all of the Democrats who really did lie to the FBI or obstruct justice need to be indicted. There is no downside to prosecuting these people any more. It's not like the Democrats are going to go easy on us if we go easy on them.