Joe Biden is the Inflation King.

Pass it on. pic.twitter.com/rhDjz66CE5

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) October 17, 2022

Mark P. Mills, a policy wonk at the Manhattan Institute, explains that the Green Energy Revolution that is supposed to replace the use of fossil fuels in the immediate future is entirely a fantasy, a case of magical thinking that would require the abolition of limits inherent in the laws of physics.

A growing chorus of voices is exhorting the public, as well as government policymakers, to embrace the necessity—indeed, the inevitability—of society’s transition to a “new energy economy.”

Advocates claim that rapid technological changes are becoming so disruptive and
renewable energy is becoming so cheap and so fast that there is no economic risk in accelerating the move to—or even mandating—a post-hydrocarbon world that no longer needs to use much, if any, oil, natural gas, or coal.

Central to that worldview is the proposition that the energy sector is undergoing the same kind of technology disruptions that Silicon Valley tech has brought to so many other markets. Indeed, “old economy” energy companies are a poor choice for investors, according to proponents of the new energy economy, because the assets of hydrocarbon companies will soon become worthless, or “stranded.” Betting on hydrocarbon companies today is like betting on Sears instead of Amazon a decade ago.

“Mission Possible,” a 2018 report by an international Energy Transitions Commission, crystallized this growing body of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. To “decarbonize” energy use, the report calls for the world to engage in three “complementary” actions: aggressively deploy renewables or so-called clean tech, improve energy efficiency, and limit energy demand.

This prescription should sound familiar, as it is identical to a nearly universal energy-policy consensus that coalesced following the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo that shocked the world. But while the past half-century’s energy policies were animated by fears of resource depletion, the fear now is that burning the world’s abundant
hydrocarbons releases dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

To be sure, history shows that grand energy transitions are possible. The key question today is whether the world is on the cusp of another. The short answer is no. There are two core flaws with the thesis that the world can soon abandon hydrocarbons. The first: physics realities do not allow energy domains to undergo the kind of revolutionary change experienced on the digital frontiers. The second: no fundamentally new energy technology has been discovered or invented in nearly a century—certainly, nothing analogous to the invention of the transistor or the Internet.

Before these flaws are explained, it is best to understand the contours of today’s hydrocarbon-based energy economy and why replacing it would be a monumental, if not an impossible, undertaking.

Eric Lind:

Current situation at my parents house…..the young neighborhood owl has stolen this stick horse and is flying around the neighborhood with it. Hilldale/Forest Park/Ridge lane neighbors…if your child is missing their stick horse, you’ll have to talk to the owl!!

Edit: for those of you questioning if the owl is hurt or “entangled” in the stick horse….we have no reason to believe this is the case as we witnessed the owl moving the horse around and even changing it’s grip on it at one point….this owl is part of a family of owls that have been in the neighborhood for about 6 months now, and this is one of the young owls…if someone sees that the owl is in danger or believes it is hurt, I’m sure the proper authorities would be contacted…

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Be sure to click on the photo to see the larger version.

Pakistani photographer Atif Saeed captured this impressive photo as the last of a series taken as the lion advanced in his direction with intent before scrambling hastily into his jeep. link

The votes are in- you’ve decided to upgrade to fish class & fly w/ 747!

747 was deemed an order of magnitude more massive than 901, who experienced troubling tummy turbulence enroute. 901 made a strong start in her 1st #FatBearWeek appearance. Expect big things in the future! pic.twitter.com/i6IPy2ajEw

— Katmai National Park (@KatmaiNPS) October 12, 2022

HT: Karen L Myers.

Russian Forces Retreating From Ukrainian Counter-Offensive.

Adam Roach answers an interesting question on Quora.

Russia is known as one of the biggest arms manufacturers, and they have no problem sending old equipment to the battlefield, yet reports say the lack equipment in the Ukranian war, where did all of their weapons go?

There are a couple of things at play in this.

On paper, Russia had one of the largest militaries in the world. In every metric. Manpower, tanks, airplanes, artillery pieces, ships, helicopters and missiles.

So factor 1; Russia just lied.

Russia claimed to have 900,000 troops at the beginning of the war. They put about a third of that number on Ukraine but then lacked reinforcements and fresh troops to rotate the tired guys out.

In NATO it’s not uncommon to have 3 backfield support guys for every frontline soldier but that’s not how Russia is set up. If it was it would have much better logistics.

Currently the rest of Russia is thin on troops. This seems confirmed by non partisan satellite imaging and actual Intel reports. Not to mention Russian citizens on Telegram. So either they lied or they have an awful lot of troops concentrated in very strange places.

While this doesn’t seem to impact actual weapons at first, it really does.

The Russians claim to operate more than a thousand fixed wing military aircraft. Only the US has more but, for instance, the US Air Force has 5000 aircraft and 400 ICBMs. To maintain all of that the Air Force has about a half a million employees in various roles and types of employment. 99% of whom are backfield support.

Most US planes are ready to go at any moment. Which is what happens when 25+ guys are tasked with keeping a single plane up and running.

Just given Russia’s published manpower numbers and assuming a somewhat similar civilian role involvement. Russia doesn’t have nearly enough people to keep its planes in the air. That is assuming Russia hasn’t fudged their manpower numbers and they absolutely have. Read the rest of this entry »

So there's a particular quirk of English grammar that I've always found quite endearing: the exocentric verb-noun compound agent noun.

It appears in a definite, remarkably narrow period – not more than 150, 200 years – before dying out, leaving loads of legacy words in its wake.

— David Thomas MOORGUE (@dtmooreeditor) September 12, 2022

There is a Lithuanian language epithet (approximate spelling) šventobezdi (š is pronounced as “sh”) which I often heard as a boy applied by adults I knew to the excessively sanctimonious type of person accusing him of flatulating holiness.

Today’s PMC (Professional Managerial Class) Community of Fashion is stacked to the rafters with šventobezdys (plural — švento means “holy” — bezdi is self-explanatory).

There was a simply dreadful referee call in Monday last’s Chiefs-Raiders game. During a third-and-eight play with 1:13 left in the first half, Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was sacked by Chiefs defensive lineman Chris Jones for a loss of six yards. While Jones was taking Carr to the ground, he stripped away the football and his momentum carried him to land on top of Carr. Referee Carl Cheffers called it “Roughing the Passer,” giving the Raiders back the ball and a first down.

Football fans were justifiably outraged, and former great Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman commentating on the game, in natural frustration at the sissification of the game, called aloud for the NFL Competition Committee “to take the dresses off.”

Me, oh my! What he said! All the fruits and nuts belonging to the self-appointed Committee to Assure Politically Correct American Speech and Expression pounced on Aikman like the proverbially duck on a Junebug.

Aikman’s “toxic masculinity” was reliably attributed by his holier-than-thou betters to previous brain injury and declared to be the kind of WrongSpeech that must be punished.

Troy Aikman really needs to find a non-misogynistic way to critique the call besides “take the dresses off”.

And I say this as someone who heard this misogyny normalized by coaches as a kid & even participated myself. Way past time to end such sports talkpic.twitter.com/lHVhv6WdEv

— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) October 11, 2022

Sports Illustrated polluted the air with considerable holiness.

Victor Vasnetsov, Baptism of Prince Vladimir, 1885-1893.

Tim Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s view of History, and territorial claims based thereon, are utter and complete nonsense.

Crimea is a district of Ukraine, as recognized by international law, and by treaties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Putin, however, has taken the view, for more than a decade now, that international law must yield to what he calls “civilization,” meaning his eccentric understanding of the past. The annoying features of the world that do not fit his scheme of the past are classified as alien, and illegitimate, and subject to destruction (Ukraine, for example).

The example of Crimea lays bare a problem within Putin’s thinking. The idea that there is some sort of immutable “civilization,” outside of time and human agency, always turns out to be based upon nothing. In the case of Crimea, Putin’s notion that the peninsula was “always” Russia is absurd, in almost more ways than one can count.

The Crimean Peninsula has been around for quite a long time, and Russia is a recent creation. What Putin has in mind when he speaks of eternity and is the baptism of a ruler of Kyiv, Valdimar, in 988. From this moment of purity, we are to understand, arose a timeless reality of Russian Crimea (and a Russian Ukraine). which we all must accept or be subject to violence. Crimea becomes “holy.”

It takes time to recount even a small portion of the ways in which this is nonsensical. First of all, the historical event itself is not at all clear. One source says that Valdimar was baptized in Crimea, as Putin likes to say; others that he was baptized in Kyiv. None of the sources date from the period itself, and so we cannot be certain that it took place at all, let alone of the locale. (If Valdimar was indeed baptized in Crimea, Putin’s logic would seem to suggest that the peninsula belongs to modern Greece, since the presumed site was part of Byzantium at the time.)

Valdimar was, to put it gently, not a Russian. There were no Russians at the time. He was the leader of a clan of Scandinavian warlords who had established a state in Kyiv, having wrenched the city from the control of Khazars. His clan was settling down, and the conversion to Christianity was part of the effort to build a state. It was called “Rus,” apparently from a Finnish word for the slavetrading company that brought the Vikings to Kyiv in the first place. It was not called “Rus” because of anything to do with today’s Russia — nor could it have been, since there was no Russia then, and no state would bear that name for another seven hundred years. Moscow, the city, did not exist at the time.

Baptism, whatever its other merits, does not create some kind of timeless continuum of power over whatever range of territory some later figure chooses to designate. If it did, international relations would certainly look very different. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Roman Empire controlled what is now Portugal, Spain, France, the Balkans, Israel, Turkey, North Africa… But we would be very surprised to hear an Italian leader (even now) cite Constantine’s baptism to claim all of these countries.

To take an example of another east European baptism: at the moment when the Lithuanian grand duke converted to Christianity, he ruled not only today’s Lithuania, but also what is now Belarus, most of what is now Ukraine, and a portion of what is now Russia. By way of baptism in 1386 he was able to marry the Polish king (who was a girl) and take the Polish crown. The Lithuanians at the time were also deeply engaged in Crimea, fighting the Crimean Khanate. Taking advantage of fractures and power struggles, the Lithuanians integrated sizable numbers of Crimean Tatars into their own armed forces, and allowed them and their descendants to settle in Lithuania, to enter commercial trades (such as tanning), to build mosques, and to print holy books.

In 1410, when the Lithuanian Grand Duke defeated the Teutonic Knights in the famous battle of Grünwald, some of his fighters were Crimean Tatars. Ostroh, in what is now Ukraine, is known as the place where the first slavonic bible was published, but it was also the site of a mosque for Crimean Tatars. Navahrudak, in what is now Belarus, is the birthplace of the famous Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz; it too was the site of a mosque for Crimean Tatars. In my office I have a printed edition of a kitab, a Crimean Tatar prayer book from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, using Arabic script, but in a Polish-Belarusian language with Turkish phrases. Its first words, enticingly, are “This is the key to heaven.” It bespeaks a coherent Crimean Tatar culture that endured for centuries extended well beyond the borders of the Crimean Khanate itself.

I like to think that this Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian-Crimean history is worth knowing — I am busily teaching it — but if the Lithuanian president were to proclaim today that Jogaila’s baptism in 1386 somehow gave him the right to rule Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and its Crimean province, we would be puzzled.

In one respect, though, our imaginary Italian or Lithuanian claims are less nonsensical than the Russian one. Even if we were to accept every other Putinesque oddity, including the profound fallacy of the legitimation of present borders by ancient baptisms, we would be brought to a halt by geography. Putin’s mythical structure is based upon the restoration of Rus, an east European entity centered in Kyiv whose high point was a thousand years ago. The Lithuanian and Italian governments are based in Vilnius and Rome, which were also the ancient capitals. Putin is talking about a state that is distant not only in time but in space. Moscow was not the capital of Rus; it did not exist when Valdimar was baptized.

RTWT

Really, it’s the other way around. If we are going by History, Ukraine belongs to Poland (or Lithuania), and “Russia” (i.e. Moscow) belongs to Kiev (i.e. Ukraine).

UPI:

In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to take flight in an airplane. Piloted by Arch Hoxsey, Roosevelt would stay aloft for 4 minutes in a Wright brothers-built plane at Kinloch Field in St. Louis, Mo.

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022

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“warmongers”? Sounds like she is going to become a Buchananite Isolationist Republican. Better than a democrat, of course, but…