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This week, the rare single guest show. But when that guest is Senator Ben Sasse, he has enough brain power to fill two segments and that’s exactly what the does on today’s episode. Mostly, we discuss his WSJ Op-Ed, Make The Senate Great Again, which is a manifesto on how to fix the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Also, some thoughts on Woodward v. Trump and the less than great mayor of the City That Never Sleeps.
Music from this week’s show: The Sand Hills of Old Nebraska by Ole Rasmussen
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Well, the Earth might not be producing it as fast as it’s being extracted, at least not relatively close to the surface. But the story of “peak oil” has been told for decades, and all the time they keep finding more.
It’s a function of technology, motivation by market prices, and few decent substitutes. It could possibly hit a price that we would regret not coming up with alternatives sooner.
Well a lot of the alternatives don’t need to be invented from scratch, the technology is already known and would “only” need to be built.
As it is, the rolling blackouts in PRC (People’s Republic of California) and elsewhere, might do more to get new nuclear projects going, than anything else. Especially “only” something like higher prices. The left has believed energy should be a lot more expensive, even before Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that’s what he intended.
Ramping up electric vehicles is not going to be fun.
They are finally getting serious about compact nuclear energy and best of all, decentralized grids. Decentralized grids *are* some thing that the left hates but doesn’t ever want to think about it or talk about it. Electricity grids are just gigantic graft and central planning monstrosities. Monoliths of oppression.
Personally I think we should save natural gas for transportation instead of electricity. but what do I know.
The heavy metals – often dependent on China proper and other places under Chinese ownership – and other hazardous materials involved with electric vehicles, mostly for the batteries, are good reasons to look for alternatives.
Ultimately, all fossil fuels – including raw petroleum – are more useful for chemistry and other manufacturing processes, rather than just burning. But we can blame the left for that too. If they only unwillingly progress through coal for electric generation, to natural gas, and then finally – eventually, hopefully – to nuclear, I put it on them.
P.S. Some kinds of transportation, such as subways and other light rail, are electric, and may be powered by natural gas in that manner.
I don’t think clean coal is a big deal as long as you are serious about creating compact nuclear plants or something. They don’t just clean it, they use less of it per output. It has all kinds of advantages except for the pollution. The planet has way too many desperately poor people to ignore it.
Natural gas is a pain for transportation because it takes up a lot of space in the vehicle. Nobody will care if oil gets too expensive.
Well, LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) takes less space than CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) but yes, they still need to haul more than if they used gasoline or diesel, because the net energy per volume of natural gas is lower.
Sorry for not joining this discussion earlier and honestly, I haven’t read all the comments yet but basically Ben Sasse is wrong. Rob very briefly touches on the salient issue which is this: Politics is downstream from Culture. It’s a fundamental tenet of civilized life.
For at least the last 60+ years, parents have let an increasingly Leftist school system from K-12 onto the academy indoctrinate young minds, so that generations of Americans
These generations of youth have grown up to be parents themselves who have been more involved in changing marital partners or inculcating recreational or more harmful drugs into their lives; frequently watch lowest-common denominator television programs that glorify sex, make light of divorce, elevate and make violence artful and essentially programming that reinforces their own lifestyles, belief systems, and dubious and shifting values. I can lay some of this blame on the waywardness of the Catholic Church post Vatican II in abrogating their role as a guiding moral force…but that’s another discussion entirely.
Like their own parents, parents still don’t bother with what their offspring are learning or may even agree with the Neo-Marxist/post-modernist claptrap their children are being taught – which is why we get an Opiode epidemic, Columbine-type massacres in schools, Marxist organizations like Antifa and BLM, any number of violent criminals, and Marxist/radical or very hard-Left-leaning city governments in cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin, and elsewhere.
This is why returning power to the local level, as an ideal philosophical principle, sounds enticing, but on a practical level, I would argue will only create more Portlands, Seattles, Minneapolises, Austins, and New York Cities. New, more conservative mayors, city councils, boards of supervisors, district attorneys, etc. would be a wonderful change, but I’m just pessimistic enough to think that that won’t happen until there are several substantive generational corrections at every level of the culture – in education, in the news media, and in the entertainment industry. I hope I’m wrong and that a transition happens quicker but I doubt it.
If anyone has the time for it, there is a long podcast just up on American Greatness that covers these types of things. It’s called the Chris Buskirk podcast.
They have a lot of money for leftist NGOs and there are a lot of college graduates that need jobs like that. They wasted their money on lousy education and they are literally in trouble, so they need socialism and everything related to it. These people will do anything to get into that club.
Socialism has a limited amount of space at the top. So eventually those people will end up falling upon each other.
I think this is a prime example of what I’m talking about in my Comment #128:
Wow! Just wow!
I noted the following, towards the bottom of the story:
Tree. Apple, right nearby. If his daughter gets any lecture at all when she gets home, it’s going to be along the lines of be more careful and don’t get caught next time.
His name is “Chip”. What would you expect?
Doesn’t mean much. I knew one guy where it was a diminutive for “Charles.”
And these are the same people who elect mayors, city council members, city supervisors:
I need to add, this is how they gain political power. They will do an Antifa work or anything to get what they need. These guys want socialism and jobs in the socialist edifice because they don’t have any better options.
Someone else should listen to that podcast and comment on it.
Why is Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook interested in CV19. They police the info like crazy. If I have a YouTube channel saying sugar cures diabetes they will leave me free. But CV19 they have decided is their business. When…what we do or dont do For CV19 makes little difference at this stage. Dont drink fish tank cleaner and be careful is the best we can hope for now. I think the tech giants are demonstrating very clearly why they need to be regulated. Too much power.
If hydroxychloroquine is vindicated, a reasonable possibility at this point, then a suit for wrongful death might be brought against YouTube or Twitter or Facebook.
Censoring the doctors that were giving speeches about hydroxychloroquine was outrageous. Any Republican that goes along with that is nuts.
I agree in principle but it appears one of those doctors was totally nuts.
It wasn’t worth completely blocking it. They could’ve done something else.
Also, that’s part of the excuse they use for blocking other people who aren’t totally nuts.
Adam Schiff is nuts, but they never censored him.
What’s particularly creepy is that putting a warning label on the material wasn’t enough for them. They had to suppress it in such a way that people wouldn’t even know it was suppressed.
That Grayson guy from Florida was/is pretty nutty too.
I didn’t mean it was a rationale for the censoring. It isn’t.
@Peter Robinson you mentioned the UAE taking great strides to get away from energy by oil. The Barakah Nuclear Plant is one example of that push with four new Korean plants (similar to the Combustion Engineering plants in Arizona) that will crank out about 6000 MWe when they all get online. Unit 1 is the only one currently finished and running I believe.