Quotes

 The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

    Paul Johnson

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

    F. A. Hayek

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

    Joseph A. Schumpeter

Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

    Frederick Douglass

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

    C. S. Lewis

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.

    Eric Hoffer

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

    Eric Hoffer

The continuing attempt to destroy free speech by some of the Elites

 Jonathan Turley provides yet another example of Elites trying to destroy free speech.

JT is on target.

I recommend joining the New Civil Liberties Alliance as a way of protecting our "rights". I put "rights" in quotation marks because the only "rights" we have are those that actually get defended by our society. The Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. If you care about freedom, you better be willing to defend it.

My view is that current society will go down as a kind of Dark Ages, at least intellectually.

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Writers, Publishers and Editors Call for Termination of Barrett Book Deal in Latest Censorship Campaign

We have been discussing the rising support for censorship on the left in the last few years. Silencing opposing views has become an article of faith for many on the left, including leading Democratic leaders from President Joe Biden to former President Barack Obama. What is most distressing is how many journalists and writers have joined the call for censorship. However, even with this growing movement, the letter of hundreds of “literary figures” this week to Penguin Random House is chilling. The editors and writers call on the company to rescind a book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett because they disagree with her judicial philosophy. After all, why burn books when you can effectively simply ban them?

The public letter entitled “We Dissent” makes the usual absurd protestation that, just because we are seeking to ban books of those with opposing views, we still “care deeply about freedom of speech.” They simply justify their anti-free speech position by insisting that any harm “in the form of censorship” is less than “the form of assault on inalienable human rights” in opposing abortion or other constitutional rights.

Yet, the letter is not simply dangerous. It is perfectly delusional. While calling for the book to be blocked, the writers bizarrely insist “we are not calling for censorship.”

While the letter has been described as signed by “literary figures,” it actually contains many who are loosely connected to the “broader literary community” like “Philip Tuley, Imam” and “Barbara Hirsch, Avid reader.” It also includes many who are simply identified by initials or first names like “Leslie” without any stated connection.

Nevertheless, there are many editors and publishing figures who list their companies (including HarperCollins, Random House and other companies) and university presses (including Cambridge, Harvard, Michigan Northwestern, Oxford) with their titles in calling for censorship. The list speaks loudly to why dissenting or conservative authors find it more difficult to publish today. These are editors who are publicly calling for banning the publication of those who hold opposing views from their own.

It also includes academics like Ignacio Leopoldo Götz Römer, Stessin Distinguished Professor Emeritus, New College of Hofstra University and Carole DeSanti, Elizabeth Drew Professor of English Language and Literature, Smith College (and former VP and Exec Ed, PenguinRandomHouse).

The focus of the letter is the fact that Barrett voted with the majority in the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Barrett has been the singled out in the past due to her judicial philosophy (which is shared by many federal judges and millions of citizens). Her home has been targeted and activists have published school information on her young children.

Recently, Rhodes College alumni sought to strip references to Barrett from the college because they disagree with her views. Her college sorority was even forced to apologize for simply congratulating her for being one of a handful of women to be nominated to the high court.

No attack appears to be beyond the pale for media or the left. Barrett sat through days of such baseless attacks on her character and even had to face attacks referencing her children. Ibram X. Kendi, the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, claimed that her adoption of two Haitian children raised the image of a “white colonizer” and suggested that the children were little more than props for their mother.

The most striking aspects of these protests is the insistence that these individuals are still faithful to free speech as they seek to silence those with opposing views. The signatories express a common righteous rage to justify censoring others. We have seen this hypocrisy openly displayed by those who want to censor authors or journalists in the name of free speech or the free press.

Writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

An article published in The Atlantic by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods called for Chinese-style censorship of the internet, stating that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

These are professors, writers, and editors who are sawing off the very branch upon which they sit. That would not be a problem but for the fact that they are doing lasting damage not only to free speech but their professions. For a writer to be against free speech is like an athlete being against exercise. It is the defining right for our country and an existential right for writers and academics.

This letter is not simply another manifestation of viewpoint intolerance. It is a statement of virtual self-loathing from people who work in the literary world; writers and editors who cannot abide the publication of opposing views.

The question is whether the companies listed with these signatories (including HarperCollins, Random House Cambridge, Harvard, Michigan Northwestern, and Oxford presses) will issue their own statements that they do not support such censorship and remain committed to publishing a wide array of views on issues like abortion.

As for Justice Barrett, such attacks are unlikely to deter her from ruling according to her long-held and well-established jurisprudential views. She does not deserve such attacks but these individuals are the face of rage in our society. It is the license of rage that can overwhelm every value. It is a general psychosis that overwhelms every countervailing value; it allows writers and editors to oppose free speech and expect us applaud them for it.

It is not that difficult. When it comes to the justices, we have learned to hate the way described by Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s “Richard III” — “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were; And he that slew them fouler than he is.”

Government’s disrespect for freedom of expression

 Here is Jenin Younes at the New Civil Liberties Alliance (originally published in Tablet Magazine).

JY is on target.

Too many in our society undervalue freedom. History suggests that the potential consequences are horrendous and likely enough to be fought against.

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One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.

The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.

Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardian still like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.

Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a video depicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.

Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”

Federal district courts have recently dismissed similar cases on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove state action. According to those judges, public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so, still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were censored on social media due to government action. Put another way, the judges declined to take the government at its word. But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage.

The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Correspondence publicized in Missouri further corroborates the theory that the companies dramatically increased censorship under duress from the government, strengthening the First Amendment claim. For example, shortly after President Biden asserted in July of 2021 that Facebook (Meta) was “killing people” by permitting “misinformation” about COVID vaccines to percolate, an executive from the company contacted the surgeon general to appease the White House. In a text message to Murthy, the executive acknowledged that the “FB team” was “feeling a little aggrieved” as “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” while he sought to “de-escalate and work together collaboratively.” These are not the words of a person who is acting freely; to the contrary, they denote the mindset of someone who considers himself subordinate to, and subject to punishment by, a superior. Another text, exchanged between Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and another CISA employee who now works at Microsoft, reads: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is another incontrovertible piece of evidence that social media companies are censoring content under duress from the government, and not due to their directors’ own ideas of the corporate or common good.

Further, emails expressly establish that the social media companies intensified censorship efforts and removed particular individuals from their platforms in response to the government’s demands. Just a week after President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” the Meta executive mentioned above wrote the surgeon general an email telling him, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken further to address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to [them].” About a month later, the same executive informed Murthy that Meta intended to expand its COVID policies to “further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content” and that the company was “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content.”

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and a prominent critic of government-imposed COVID restrictions, has publicized internal Twitter communications he obtained through discovery in his own lawsuit showing that high-ranking members of the Biden administration, including White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, had pushed Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform. In messages from April 2021, a Twitter employee noted that a meeting with the White House had gone relatively well, though the company’s representatives had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” to which “mercifully we had answers” (emphasis added).

About two months later, days after Dr. Fauci publicly deemed Berenson a danger, and immediately following the president’s statement that social media companies were “killing people,” and despite assurances from high-ups at the company that his account was in no danger, Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account. If this does not qualify as government censorship of an individual based on official disapproval of his viewpoints, it would be difficult to say what might. Berenson was reinstated on Twitter in July 2022 as part of the settlement in his lawsuit.

In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v. Sullivan, held that “public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against” booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same reasoning should apply to the Biden administration campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its preferred viewpoints.

The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. Just like the booksellers in Bantam, social media platforms undoubtedly “do not lightly disregard” such possible consequences, as Twitter’s use of the term “mercifully” indicates.

It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great Barrington Declaration. More discovery lies ahead, from top White House officials including Dr. Fauci, that may yield evidence of even more direct involvement by the government in preventing Americans from hearing their views. But Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and countless social media users have had their First Amendment rights violated nonetheless.

The government’s involvement in censorship of specific perspectives, and direct role in escalating such censorship, has what is known in First Amendment law as a chilling effect: Fearing the repercussions of articulating certain views, people self-censor by avoiding controversial topics. Countless Americans, including the Missouri plaintiffs, have attested that they do exactly that for fear of losing influential and sometimes lucrative social media accounts, which can contain and convey significant social and intellectual capital.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognizes that a corollary of the First Amendment right to speak is the right to receive information because “the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender’s First Amendment right to send them.” All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, and myriad additional people, like the reporters who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post and found themselves denounced as agents of Russian disinformation, who have been censored by social media platforms at the urging of the U.S. government. That deprivation strangled public debate on multiple issues of undeniably public importance. It allowed Fauci, Collins, and various other government actors and agencies, to mislead the public into believing there was ever a scientific consensus on lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. It also arguably influenced the 2020 election.

The administration has achieved public acquiescence to its censorship activities by convincing many Americans that the dissemination of “misinformation” and “disinformation” on social media presents a grave threat to public safety and even national security. Over half a century ago, in his notorious concurrence in New York Times v. United States (in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the newspaper from printing the Pentagon Papers) Justice Hugo Black rejected the view that the government may invoke such concepts to override the First Amendment: “[t]he word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment,” he wrote. Justice Black cited a 1937 opinion by Justice Charles Hughes explaining that this approach was woefully misguided: “The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly … that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.”

The Founders of our country understood that line-drawing becomes virtually impossible once censorship begins and that the personal views and biases of those doing the censoring will inevitably come into play. Moreover, they recognized that sunlight is the best disinfectant: The cure for bad speech is good speech. The cure for lies, truth. Silencing people does not mean problematic ideas disappear; it only drives their adherents into echo chambers. People who are booted off Twitter, for example, often turn to Gab and Gettr, where they are less likely to encounter challenges to patently false posts claiming, for example, that COVID vaccines are toxic.

Indeed, this case could not illustrate more clearly the First Amendment’s chief purpose, and why the framers of the Constitution did not create an exception for “misinformation.” Government actors are just as prone to bias, hubris, and error as the rest of us. Drs. Fauci and Collins, enamored of newfound fame and basking in self-righteousness, took it upon themselves to suppress debate about the most important subject of the day. Had Americans learned of the Great Barrington Declaration and been given the opportunity to contemplate its ideas, and had scientists like Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff been permitted to speak freely, the history of the pandemic era may have unfolded with far less tragedy—and with far less damage to the institutions that are supposed to protect public health.

John Cochrane on the British (and US) economic growth dilemma

 Here is John Cochrane on the British and US growth dilemma.

John H. Cochrane is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute.

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The Liz Truss Tragedy

The former British prime minister’s downfall holds important lessons for growth-minded policymakers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. While her diagnosis of the country’s economic problem was spot on, she fatally mismanaged both the politics and the messaging of her policy response.

STANFORD – Liz Truss’s stint as British prime minister is over, but she was right that the United Kingdom needs growth. Her downfall is tragic, because growth is the only path out of the country’s economic dilemma.

The UK is surprisingly poor. Its GDP per capita is just $43,000, compared to $60,000 in the United States. The average British home is one-third the size of the average US home. Worse, the country’s economy is not growing. Its GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2007. Productivity – the underlying source of economic growth – has been flat for over a decade.

The UK desperately needs supply-side reforms. Surging inflation tells us that demand-side stimulus is a spent force.

If anything, Truss’s proposed reforms were too mild. A 40% top marginal income tax rate (down from 45%) would not make the UK a low-tax free-market Shangri-La, especially considering that it would also still have a 20% value-added tax (VAT), national insurance taxes, property taxes, corporate taxes, and more. Recall that US President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (a Democrat) cut the top federal marginal rate from 70% to 28%.

Truss also proposed free-market “investment zones.” But if one accepts that pro-investment tax and planning conditions are good in blighted areas, why not the whole country?

The UK is at a post-Brexit crossroads. Will it become a free-trade, entrepreneurial, financial hub – a “Singapore on Thames”? Or does Brexit mean protecting and subsidizing inefficient businesses and places even more than the European Union allows?

Unfortunately, we now know the answer. Truss’s critics have no counterproposal that has any chance of reigniting growth. The stage is set for further high-tax, high-subsidy, over-regulated decline.

As sound as Truss’s plans were in economic-policy terms, her government’s handling of the messaging and the politics was spectacularly inept. That is an important lesson for those of us who want to see more growth-oriented policies in the US, Canada, and Europe.

One obvious mistake was Truss’s announcement of a £60 billion ($68 billion) blowout to hold down gas prices. That is not a good way to launch a pro-growth revolution.

She then moved on to “tax cuts,” predictably raising the ire of the high-tax intelligentsia. In announcing the policy, neither Truss nor her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, explained the point of lowering tax rates. For example, Kwarteng sold tax cuts as “putting money back into people’s pockets.” But such Keynesian stimulus is the last thing the country needs amid historic inflation. Kwarteng should have explained that lower tax rates improve the incentives to work, save, invest, start a business, or, in the case of corporate taxes, move a business to the UK or keep it there. (Ideally, one cuts tax rates but broadens the base, maintaining revenues until spending falls.)

If you can’t explain that clearly and consistently, you either don’t understand or believe your own message, or you think voters are too dumb to comprehend it. Either way, your revolution will fail. In the face of predictable, implacable hostility from the entrenched left-wing media and economic commentariat, a free-market revolution needs great communicators.

By starting with taxes and subsidies, Truss and Kwarteng guaranteed that nobody would pay attention to the most important parts of the plan: the essential pro-growth regulatory reforms that they had described in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained. Britain’s housing restrictions, as in the US, lead to absurdly high prices, which stymies many businesses and the workers they might hire. The situation is especially harmful to less-advantaged people who cannot afford to live near high-productivity jobs. Truss had also planned to bring back North Sea oil production and lift the UK’s ban on fracking. These are sensible responses to a global energy crisis.

The lesson is that growth-minded policymakers should start with microeconomic reforms. Everyone can see that over-regulation and restrictions on housing and energy production are hobbling supply. Even climate-change activists are noticing that it is too difficult to get permits for windmills and transmission lines. Everyone can see that schools are awful and getting worse. Workers as well as business owners and managers can see that labor regulations are straitjacketing their workplaces. People can see in everyday experience how social-program disincentives lead some people not to work at all.

Patiently explaining these problems to voters can also make for good politics. We all long for simple mind-the-store competence in our governments. Fixing dysfunction is a visible achievement that works right away, with no short-run cost.

Truss’s handling of the politics was even worse than her marketing. Margaret Thatcher and Reagan faced the same withering scorn from the chattering classes, and they had to endure years of hardship before their reforms took root. But they held firm.

Truss’s critics seized on UK bond-market hiccups, though these were tiny compared to those of the 1980s. They also were largely attributable to the Bank of England raising rates, and to a pension risk regulation fiasco. [Previous posts ending here.] Nonetheless, Truss quickly gave in. By starting with an energy blowout to placate the left, she already encouraged her opponents to go in for the kill. When a shark is on your trail, you don’t offer it a foot and then assume that you’ll both get along. When an iron lady was needed, Truss proved to be made of straw.

The US, too, is a high-tax, over-regulated, over-subsidized, high-debt, slow-growth economy. For us, too, supply-side reforms are the only way out. Yet many of our conservative voices now pander to voters by advocating big-government big-tax nationalism, protectionism, subsidies, and crony capitalism, albeit directed in different directions than the left.

For those of us who still understand that the only real solution lies in economic freedom and small, competent government, Truss’s downfall offers important lessons. We must heed them so that we don’t blow our chance if we get one.

Some perspective on election deniers

 Here is Jonathan Turley's column "Who Denies Election Results?

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A Democratic myth has arisen that former President Donald Trump’s denial of the accuracy of the 2020 vote was “unprecedented.”

Unfortunately, the history of U.S. elections is often a story of both legitimate and illegitimate election denialism.

The 1800, 1824, 1876, and 1960 elections were all understandably questioned. In some of these cases, a partisan House of Representatives decided the winner.

Presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000 did not accept the popular vote results in Florida. He spent five weeks futilely contesting the state’s tally — until recounts and the Supreme Court certified it.

The ensuing charge that former President George W. Bush was “selected not elected” was the Democrats’ denialist mantra for years.

In 2004, Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. and 31 Democratic House members voted not to certify the Ohio election results in their unhinged efforts to overturn the election. Those denialists included the current sanctimonious chairman of the January 6 select committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson, D-Miss.

After 2016, crackpot Democratic orthodoxy for years insisted that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to “steal” certain victory from Hillary Clinton.

Clinton herself claimed that Trump was not a “legitimate” president. No wonder she loudly joined #TheResistance to obstruct his presidency.

The serial denialist Clinton later urged Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election if he lost.

Also after 2016, left-wing third-party candidate and denialist Jill Stein vainly sued in courts to disqualify voting machine results in preselected states.

A denialist host of Hollywood C-list actors in 2016 cut television commercials begging members of the Electoral College to violate their oaths and instead flip the election to Hillary Clinton.

Clinton herself had hired foreign national Christopher Steele to concoct a dossier of untruths to smear her 2016 campaign opponent, Trump.

The FBI took up Clinton’s failed efforts. It likewise paid in vain her ancillaries like Christopher Steele to “verify” the dossier’s lies.

The bureau further misled a FISA court about the dossier’s authenticity. An FBI lawyer even altered a document, as part of a government effort to disrupt a presidential transition and presidency.

The Clinton-FBI Russian-collusion hoax was a small part of the progressive effort to warp the 2016 election result.

The Washington Post giddily bragged about various groups formed to impeach Trump in his first days in office, on the pretext he was illegitimately elected.

Rosa Brooks, an Obama Administration Pentagon lawyer, less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration wrote a long denialist essay in Foreign Policy outlining a strategy to remove the supposedly illegitimate president. She discussed the options of impeachment, the 25th Amendment — and even a military coup.

When rioting exploded in the streets of Washington D.C. after the election results became clear, Madonna infamously shouted to a mass crowd that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, presumably with the Trump family in it.

Was that not the most violent form of election denialism?

The election denialist Stacey Abrams became a media heartthrob and left-wing cult hero. Abrams monetized her ridiculous denialism (“voter suppression”) by stumping the country from 2018 to 2021 claiming, without evidence, that the 2018 the Georgia gubernatorial election was rigged. In truth, she lost by over 50,000 votes.

Time magazine’s Molly Ball in a triumphalist essay bragged that in 2020 a combination of Big Tech money from Silicon Valley — fueled by Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million infusion — absorbed the balloting collection and counting of several key voting precincts weighed to help Biden.

Ball bragged of careful pre-election censoring of the contemporary news by Big Tech. Most notably, that effort spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was “Russian disinformation.”

Left-wing interest groups modulated the often-violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa street protests of 2020 in efforts to aid the Biden campaign.

Ball summed up that left-wing election engineering effort as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” and called it “the secret history of the 2020 election.”

So, who exactly were those “secret” warpers of the 2020 election?

As Ball put it: “A well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

It is entirely legitimate to question the probity and legality of those systematic left-wing efforts in key states to overturn long-standing voting laws passed by state legislatures.

Then followed an even larger effort to render Election Day a mere construct for the first time in American history. Over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day, the vast majority of them (and by design) Biden votes. Somehow customary ballot disqualification rates of mail-in ballots in some states plunged – even as their numbers exploded.

The scariest form of election interference was the 2020 “cabal.” The FBI, Silicon Valley, street protesters, and the media all conspired to work for the “right result.”

Apparently, that “conspiracy” was the denialists’ response to the 2016 victory of Trump that they never accepted.

CNN and MSNBC Ex-Bosses Struggle to Justify Burying the Hunter Biden Story

 Jonathan Turley points out the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and media election manipulation (fraud) concerning the Hunter Biden news.

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“He was not Arrested”: CNN and MSNBC Ex-Bosses Struggle to Justify Burying the Hunter Biden Story

“Denial is not just a river in Africa.” Those sage words from SNL character Stuart Smalley seemed prophetic this week as ex-MSNBC boss Phil Griffin and ex-CNN boss Jeff Zucker were confronted about their burying of the Hunter Biden story. Their tortured and transparent rationalizations caused an immediate response from some of us who have written about the scandal since its inception. That included Griffin’s almost laughable claim that their approach before the election was justified because “he was never arrested.”

Zucker and Griffin were in full spin mode in explaining why they did not believe that it was simply not worthy pursuing an alleged multimillion dollar influence peddling scheme with foreign interests by the Biden family.

Zucker insisted:

Okay. No, I mean but I mean, that’s the problem…

We did. We did look into it. But first of all, you know, with regard to the son of the candidate, you know, he was the son of the candidate. He wasn’t the candidate. The question that you’ll come back with is, well, but what role did the candidate play in his business dealings? You know, frankly, with ten days or two weeks to go, it was looked at by very credible organizations, including The Wall Street Journal —Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and they found nothing at that time.”

The problem is that the laptop makes repeated references to access to the candidate and millions in obvious influence peddling with Russian, Chinese, and other foreign sources. It is laughable to suggest that CNN would not have pursued such a story involving Trump children.

Joe Biden was not the vehicle of the influence peddling proceeds. He was the object of the influence peddling.

Nevertheless, CNN continued to report President Biden’s repeated and unchallenged claim that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” Those denials continued even after an audiotape surfaced showing President Biden leaving a message for Hunter specifically discussing coverage of those dealings.

Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. It was equally evident that the Biden family was selling influence and access.

There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Yet, Zucker maintained:

Okay. So my point is, it’s easy to say we should have spent more time on that. Listen, do I think it’s legitimate to look at. Sure. Do I think that like it’s a legitimate criticism to say that in the ten days, 14 days prior to the election, you didn’t spend enough time on it? Not really.

The problem is that, even after the election, CNN did not even acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop for roughly two years despite key figures confirming the contents.

Yet, CNN continued to ignore the story even as more details emerged. The laptop contained details to the the extent of his knowledge and involvement. It appears that Biden met with at least 14 of Hunter’s business associates from the U.S., Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan over the course of his vice presidency. That includes Hunter’s Mexican business associates, Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani who visited the West Wing on Feb. 26, 2014, and Joe was later photographed with Hunter giving Velasco and Magnani a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room.

Even as foreign intelligence involvement and millions in payments were being discussed, CNN engaged in willful blindness under Zucker, who previously admitted that rating drove the unrelenting anti-Trump focus of his coverage. CNN is currently trying to undo much of Zucker’s work that led to plunging ratings.

Griffin then added his own spin on the refusal of MSNBC to pursue the story:

“He was never arrested. The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.”

So the millions in influence peddling or criminal acts featured on the laptop was not particularly newsworthy. It was the absence of a perp walk?

That may come as a bit surprise to Donald Trump Jr. who was the subject of 24/7 coverage on the Trump Tower meeting, including unsupported claims from CNN and MSNBC legal experts that there was strong evidence of criminal conduct. Some of us pushed back on these claims but CNN and MSNBC did wall-to-wall coverage with the same legal experts for weeks on the criminal enterprise revealed at Trump Tower.

On CNN, viewers were told that this is the long-sought “smoking gun” on collusion. Norm Eisen, a White House ethics czar under former President Obama, reportedly has invoked the Logan Act — a law from 1799 that makes it a crime for citizens to intervene in disputes or controversies between the United States and foreign governments. (The law is widely viewed as facially unconstitutional).

Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush, declared that the meeting “borders on treason.” Others declared it a possible violation of the federal law banning foreign contributions to federal campaigns.

MSNBC justice and security analyst Matthew Miller said Trump Jr. could now go to jail because “it doesn’t have to be money … it can be, potentially, accepting information. So he’s potentially confessing in his statement to committing a crime.”

There was no circumspection or hesitancy at CNN or MSNBC in airing any and all such criminal theories on the meeting. Of course, no such charges were ever brought.

When the transcripts of the meeting came out, the media simply moved on. CNN, which has a bevy of legal analysts who have been flogging the Trump Tower conspiracy for months, ran the headline, “Trump Tower transcripts detail quest for dirt on Hillary Clinton.” Nothing on the great conspiracy or collusion.

Notably, it was still news that Trump’s team wanted to hear about possible criminal conduct. Yet, the media pushed false Russian collusion claims from the Steele dossier that the Clinton campaign funded (while denying that it was doing so). That was not worthy of the same attention on the “quest for dirt on Donald Trump.”

Likewise, stories rebutting the laptop allegations were considered important news on the networks. Both CNN and MSNBC eagerly spread the false claim of 51 intelligence experts who declared that the laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.”

That is why SNL’s Stuart Smalley might have been more useful than CNN’s Michael Smerconish in working through these “issues” with the former executives. It all had that Daily Affirmation feel as Zucker and Griffin seemed to assure each other “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough and doggone it, people like you.”

Election fraud comes in many forms – including speech suppression

 Here is a case summary from the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

I recommend this organization as an alternative to the ACLU, which was politicized many years ago.

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State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Biden, et al.

Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19.

NCLA joined the lawsuit, State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al., representing renowned epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions.

This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to social media companies that only recently were made public.

Government-induced censorship is achieved through a wide variety of mechanisms, ranging from complete bans, temporary bans, “shadow bans” (where often neither the user nor his audience is notified of the suppression of speech), deboosting, de-platforming, de-monetizing, restricting access to content, requiring users to take down content, and imposing warning labels that require click-through to access content, among others. These methods also include temporary and permanent suspensions of disfavored speakers.

This sort of censorship, which strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech—constitutes unlawful government action. The federal government is deciding whose voices and ideas may be heard, and whose voices and ideas must be silenced. Moreover, this state action deprives Americans of their right to hear the views of those who are being silenced, a First Amendment corollary of the right to free speech. The government’s policy of coercing social-media companies to censor Plaintiffs’ viewpoints should be declared unlawful and halted immediately.

The coming blackouts

 Here is a link to an article by a planning engineer (electric). It illustrates how irrational is our current electric grid policy.

Once again, Government is proving to be the problem, not the solution. Climate alarmists also are advocating policies that will prove unwise.

Here are some excerpts.

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The “green” provisions of the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act are sweeping and it appears they may do more harm than good. The philosophy behind the inflation Reduction Act seems to reflect the belief that if you can get the ball rolling, adding additional wind and solar will get easier. However, as Part 1 discussed, the compounding problems associated with increasing the penetration level of wind and solar generation are extreme.

Replacing conventional synchronous generating resources, which have been the foundation of the power system, with asynchronous intermittent resources will degrade the reliability of the grid and contribute to blackout risk. The power system is the largest, most complicated wonderful machine ever made. At any given time, it must deal with multiple problems and remain stable. No resources are perfect; in a large system you will regularly find numerous problems occurring across the system. Generally, a power system can handle multiple problems and continue to provide reliable service. However, when a system lacks supportive generation sources, it becomes much more likely it will not be able function reliably when problems occur.

Just as a pile of dry wood and flammable material can be sparked from many potential sources, or a very unhealthy person could succumb to many different threats, a weakened power system is more vulnerable to many conditions than a robust one. In this post I discussed responsibility for the Texas winter blackout. Many things went wrong that day in Texas. But often many things do go wrong – the real problem was that the Texas market did not provide incentives for standby resources. In Texas there were not enough committed resources to provide for the system load levels and potential contingencies. Texas relied on an energy market designed to favor wind and solar resources and it failed them. However, many analyses of the Texas blackout focused on the proximate conditions (problems of the sort that are common) ignoring or denying the major underlying problem.

We are seeing blackouts and system problems all over the world now, unlike in the past. There is a common factor for most – high penetration of intermittent asynchronous wind and solar generation. This commonality is generally ignored when evaluating the individual outages as vested interests focus on the triggering conditions. There are always going to be potential triggering conditions. No one anywhere will eliminate triggering conditions so absolving green resources of blame because such things exist in the real world only makes sense as theater. When faced with “green” outages, focusing on the proximate triggers serves to protect “green” interests and helps mask the emerging greater problems to come.

The Inflation Reduction Act is promoting a system with less stability, robustness and reliability. Besides describing how these green programs contribute in general to major outages, I will conclude this article by identifying a specific type of outage likely to become more common due to provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Before describing how the Act impacts the system, I will take a detour and describe a specific past incident where a system element which was valuable at one penetration level became a system detriment at a higher penetration level.

Penetration Case Review: Heat Pumps

A heat pump is an efficient way to heat or cool. As a refrigerator transfers the heat out of the refrigerator to the coils in the back to cool or freeze your food while making your house warmer, a heat pump can transfer heat between a home or building and the outdoors. In the winter it transfers heat from the outdoors to the interior. In the summer it transfers heat from the house to the outdoors. With a heat pump you don’t “create” heat you merely use a small amount of electricity to efficiently transfer heat in the preferred direction.

Even when the temperature is cold outside a heat pump can extract heat from the outdoors and use it to warm a home or residence. As the temperature drops below 40 degrees. However. heat pumps become less efficient and as temperatures drop below freezing, the home must be heated with a backup method, usually resistance heating. Resistance heating makes the process more expensive and inefficient. It is possible to exchange heat with a source below the ground or a source of water to get around this problem, or alternatively to provide heat from natural gas backup, but these approaches have not worked out as practical means on any significant scale.

Because of their behavior at colder temperatures, heat pumps are not appropriate for all parts of the country. In the north the many hours they would have to run with resistance heat makes them both environmentally irresponsible and too expensive. Natural gas is a better option. They work where it is hot enough some of the year that air conditioners are installed anyway (thus they don’t increase the summer peak) and where it is cold but not too cold at most times. If they run in resistance mode only a few days a year that does not cancel the net benefits, but with longer time periods the benefits are lost.

Encouraging heat pumps was all the rage, when I first started working in the southeastern US. Most entities in the south did not see winter peak loads, so adding heat pump load in the winter was a great thing. It was a win, win, win situation for all involved. The economics work generally the same for all utilities, but I will describe how they worked for distribution cooperatives.

Distribution co-ops pay a demand charge based on their peak load and an energy charge based on their kwh usage. Residential sales are on a kwh usage, so the peak charge must be recovered through the kwh charge imposed on residential customers. The better a Co-ops’ load factor (total kwhs sold/(peak demand*total hours), the lower their rate can be set. Heat pumps did not raise the demand charge, but increased energy sales and allowed the demand charge to be spread out over more energy sales lowering energy costs for all.

Builders were rewarded with free underground distribution if they committed to building all electric homes which relied on heat pumps. Rebates were given for heat pump installations and often those installing heat pumps were rewarded with free water heaters. My company had a big marketing division supporting the work of the distribution cooperatives to support efforts at increasing heat pumps. It worked well, almost perfectly. The only drawback was that on very cold days the heat pumps would switch to resistance heating and this made the customers’ meters spin at high consumption levels, raising heating costs a lot that day. But with incentives and the saving at most times, those costs were not that significant. The overall winter load increased a lot on those days, but it was still below the summer peak at most times. Plus, when it’s cold you can put a little more load on the power lines and fossil fuel generators can provide more power without overheating. So, the heat pumps did not contribute to increasing fixed costs.

Everything was going well as the penetration level of heat pumps increased. But there was a cloud on the horizon. Looking ahead it seemed like that within the decade our winter peak would move to surpass the summer peak. This meant that the winter peak would soon drive the need for improvements and expansions. Unfortunately, what should be technical disagreements are often political problems as well. In a battle of experts, the consultants working for the marketers disputed the trend. The programs continued and everything was great in the short term.

Sooner than expected the winter peak did hit and it hit hard and it hit regularly. On the coldest days when the resistive heating kicked in, peak demand rose sharply and swiftly. The winter “needle shaped” peak drove investment and costs. The mostly residential cooperatives who had invested big in the heat pump programs had to pay rates based on their demand during the new winter peak, greatly raising their average energy costs.

While almost no one wanted to see it coming, once the effects hit, most everyone in the power supply chain wished they had. This was a terrible blow to rural electric cooperatives who had invested big to improve their load factor, only to find they had subsidized a worse winter load factor. Residential customers are not charged for contributing to peak demand (the meters don’t measure that) so for them their contribution to the demand charges has no significant penalty. For customers in this region, it still makes sense to put in heat pumps so the problems continue to grow for some to this day.

The Inflation Reduction Act Enabling Blackout Conditions

The Inflation Reduction Act seeks to decarbonize the grid. In looking at the grid, you should not make one goal a priority but should instead seek to balance competing objectives. See Balance and the Grid for a discussion of how efforts to maximize one objective without due attention to other major goals can result in a worsening condition for all goals. It seems apparent that all the “green” measures in the Inflation Reduction Act were included because independently they all seem capable of reducing carbon. I have not seen any evidence that any consideration was given to system reliability or how these measures might interact to create problems.

The green measures encouraged by the inflation Reduction Act will lead to generic blackouts in many situations as described earlier in this essay and in Part 1. Presented below is a chart from a previous posting, titled “Will California “learn” to avoid Peak Rolling Blackouts?” The projected peak that was causing blackout concerns was only around 10% above the average for the previous year’s included in the chart.

The specific prediction of an outage condition I will make here involves winter peak demand conditions. Winter peaks can be extreme, much more so than summer peaks. As temperatures climb in the summer, air conditioners reach a saturation point. The climb in summer peak demand with each additional increase in temperature typically flattens out. In the winter each additional degree drop can increase demand more than the one before. There are a lot of potential sources of resistive heat that increase demand. In severe cold more and more heating elements come into play and the increase in demand rather than flattening can go up exponentially. Peak winter loads tend to hit just before sunrise. The system sees a rapidly rising peak, often described as needle shaped, which drops as the sun comes up and temperatures warm. Such peaks can easily be 5 to 20% above normal winter peaks in many areas. Thus these conditions have the potential to cause more severe concerns than California sees during extreme summer conditions.

The Act encourages solar at the bulk, distribution and residential levels. Solar will be of no benefit during such a peak, but does serve to push out other resources which might support the system during such conditions. Plus, there is a double whammy. Solar power supply supplied to the grid will not be there and at that same time homes usually supplemented with solar will be putting maximal demands on the grid. (Note -The infrastructure needs to supply a home which only puts a demand on the system a few hours a year concurrent with other uses maximum demand is basically the same as the infrastructure need to support a full requirements home. It is challenging to collect that from such customers. When there are rate challenges and it’s difficult to collect system costs, needed infrastructure often is delayed.) In any case widespread adoption and reliance on solar creates concerns around winter morning peaks.

The Act encourages wind development. Like solar, wind will push other better suited resources out of the supply pool. Wind is generally slower just before sunrise and winter is not generally peak wind season. In any case wind is intermittent and some of the times during cold weather wind is not available. Some say that wind tends to rise up as temperatures get colder and there are ways to keep turbines from freezing,. Nonetheless, we do see freezing problems and a tendency for wind to be there is not a guarantee. Green resources perform much better in theory than practice. At least at sometimes wind power will not likely be a great asset during winter morning peaks demand conditions.

The Act encourages efficiency. This could help to reduce load and thereby make severe outages less likely. But the real problem with peak demand is the difference in demand during the extreme peak period and other more normal high load periods. If efficiency reduces load, you will likely see a reduction in generating resources to serve the load at all high load levels. The risk from peak conditions is more attributable to the delta between the winter peak demand and more common high load levels. This is because regular loads drive generation additions more than extreme conditions. I don’t know that efficiency measures work better during the most extreme winter temperatures than it does at normal winter cold temperatures (probably less so), therefore its mitigating impact may be small to none. Also, there are those who might argue that consistent with Jevon’s Paradox efficiency efforts lead to increased energy consumption. The basic mechanism, behind this counterintuitive theorem, is illustrated by mechanisms observed such as individual consumers with more efficient homes choosing to heat more rooms or increase comfort because you get more for your money in an efficient home.

Solar, wind and efficiency are intended to decrease fossil fuel-based resources. Combustion turbines and hydro are generally the most appropriate resource for limited duration demand surges. The expansion potential of hydro is very limited and this resource can not make up for lost combustion turbines in most areas. Combustion turbines perform relatively well in cold conditions and old mostly useless units traditionally have been called on to get the system through short term peak demand conditions.

To be fair, the Act does encourage energy storage and that should help somewhat with peak demand concerns. Care is needed as batteries do not give their best performance in cold temperatures. But in light of all the other changes that is a huge burden to place on technology at this stage of development.

The chart below shows the US typical resource generation by major energy source. Imagine how this chart will look as fossil fuel is phased out. Hydro only makes up about 6% of the mix and expansion there is limited. Nuclear could replace these resources but it is not great for ramping up and down to follow needle peaks. If wind and solar step up to replace fossil fuels this leave us vulnerable to energy shortages during winter peaks just before daybreak. Battery capability would need to be huge, expansive and probably would not be procured in advance of demonstrated needs.

It is frightening to imagine how to serve a vast winter system demand just before daybreak in the green future. But one more feature of the Clean Air Act helps raise concerns to an even higher level. The Inflation Reduction Act subsidizes heat pumps!

Heat pumps are attractive to the Inflation Reeducation Act for only one reason. They help reduce the demand for gas furnaces. Subsidies will be available in areas where today heat pumps are not considered practical. Today it doesn’t make sense to drive resistance heating with electricity generated from fossil fuels. It’s inefficient and environmentally unsound. However, you can theorize that if all electricity is green, inefficient electric heat is green too. Replacing natural gas heat with heat pumps is not a good idea when one considers their impact on the power system during winter peak conditions.

Under the Act’s subsidy provisions people who live in areas where heat pumps don’t make sense may decide to get them anyway with the subsidy. For example, if you live in a cooler area and you’ve gotten by without air conditioning, now your units can be subsidized and the resistance heat will be there for you in the winter too. Green advocates talk of shaping the load to better use resources, but that evidently can be quickly forgotten when other green objectives emerge. Putting in a bunch of heat pumps and building tremendous infrastructure to support their short-term demands is far from environmentally responsible.

Specific Blackout Prediction

With a lot of help from the Inflation Reduction Act, we will likely see these full set of conditions in many areas:Very cold pre-dawn extreme temperatures
Backup quick start fossil fuel combustion turbines have been largely driven out of the resource mix,
Nuclear, hydro and battery resources are tapped out
Solar is absent from the distribution side and not available on the generation side
Wind may or may not be blowing
Heat pumps are operating maxed out in resistance mode, along with other resistive heating to drive system load to extreme heights
As with every power system there will be a few problems on the system
System will be forced to deliberately shed a lot of load or may go unstable and suffer crippling blackouts

To the extent as claimed by some, climate change is driving more extreme winter peaks in the near term, we may see this situation sooner than later. In any case green measures are driving us there with current historical weather patterns. Being without heat and power in extremely cold conditions is highly problematic for most individuals, businesses and industries.

What can be done to prevent such blackouts? Unfortunately, not much attention seems to have been paid to concerns of this sort. It might be argued we need vast surpluses of wind and storage (those not paying attention may argue we need more solar) to support winter load. The cost and environmental impact of these extra mostly underused resources would be large and prohibitive. This would be true weather the resources were wind, solar, batteries or nuclear. Keeping older already manufactured combustion turbines around for emergency conditions would be a much more reasonable means of mitigating risks. The additional environmental impacts of using something already manufactured and placed in service are small compared to building extensive new resources, no matter how green these resources may be claimed to be.

How do we encourage smart ways to provide emergency capacity? Current energy policies are seeking to direct as much money toward “green” resources and costs away from them. As discussed earlier, in Texas they are moving away from recognizing capacity value consistent with a trend towards energy only markets. I’m a big fan of markets, but they don’t do a good job of protecting against extreme conditions especially when no one has ultimate responsibility (except governmental entities) for ensuring load is served. Some measures would need to be employed to compensate for providing and ensuring combustion turbines are available for emergency conditions. But no one seems to be talking about such measures. The Inflation Reduction Act appears to be a single focus approach to a nuanced problem. Cut CO2 emissions and hope for great innovations. Reliability threats apparently are not on their radar, nor are they an articulated or contemplated concerns. It’s a shame because reduced reliability can wreak havoc on the economy and the environment.

“Be Afraid, Be Actually Afraid”: Reporters Panic at the Thought of Twitter Restoring Free Speech Protections

 Jonathan Turley is on target, again.

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“Be afraid, be actually afraid.” Those words from former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff captures the hyperventilation in the media this week. No it is not Vladimir Putin’s threat of unleashing a nuclear war or the word that our national debt has reached a staggering $31 trillion. No, it is the news that Elon Musk may go forward with the purchase of Twitter and . . . [trigger warning] . . . free speech protections might be restored on the platform. The pearl-clutching of various media and academic figures shows how engrained the censorship culture has become in the United States.

After Musk indicated that he was going forward, the Twitter stock quickly soared. The news that Musk might bring an end to Twitter’s extensive censorship system had previously drawn people back to the platform. However, the media is in full panic mode that the control over speech could be loosened with Musk. Twitter employees also previously panicked at the thought that they might lose some of their control over the speech of others.

NBC News reporter Ben Collins quickly raised the most immediate concern that the sudden ability to speak freely on Twitter could impact the midterm elections.

For those of you asking: Yes, I do think this site can and will change pretty dramatically if Musk gets full control over it.

No, there is no immediate replacement.

If it gets done early enough, based on the people he's aligned with, yes, it could actually affect midterms.

Consider that for a second: the loss of control over political speech could mean a loss of control over the midterm elections. There is, of course, no concern by Collins that Twitter (and other social media companies) have long been “aligned” with Democrats and the Biden Administration.

NPR editor Neela Banerjee retweeted and echoed his concern about “the broader implications for the rest of us of a Musk takeover of Twitter.” Others joined in on the collective panic that there could be a loss of control over what people say on social media.

BBC journalist Dickens Olewe warned that “Guardrails will be dropped, misinfo & conspiracy theories will thrive. No functional alternatives available, this is it: a complete destruction of the global public square. Been nice y’all.” In other words, free speech protections will lead to the destruction of “the global public square” by losing control of who can speak or what people can say.

PoliticusUSA head Sarah Reese Jones seemed to move from the desperate to the outright delusional: “Before 2020, Facebook deplatformed progressives, then it came for mainstream media and elevated only radicalized conservatives. Cut to 2022, we know Elon Musk plans to do same with Twitter. We know how damaging it will be.Tech giants pose ongoing threat to western democracy.”

That’s right, social media companies have been favoring conservatives and targeting progressives. That is why a wide array of conservative groups and figures have been banned or suspended. That is why the Hunter Biden laptop story was buried before the election. That is why there are now numerous reports of backchannels with the government in censoring opposing views.

Euronews correspondent Shona Murray tweeted, “The end of Twitter as we know it is nigh.” I certainly hope so. However, it may be a case of “your Twitter is dead, long live Twitter.” As discussed earlier, the Internet was once the greatest single advance in free speech since the printing press.

The one thing that we agree on is that this could be a historic moment and free speech could be returning to a major platform of social media. The company seemingly wrote off free speech years ago. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

I have written about five steps that Musk can take to restore free speech. However, the key is to break a culture of censorship at the company. If Musk moves Twitter out of San Francisco, it may help in that restructuring in replacing staff with those committed to free speech values. However, the key to restoring these values is to adopt what I have called the “first amendment model” for the company.

The question is whether Musk will continue to hold the courage to follow his stated convictions on free speech. I hope so. If so, the many censorship advocates in the media certainly do have reason to fear that free speech could be return to a major social media company.

Massive errors in FBI’s Active Shooting Reports regarding cases where civilians stop attacks: Instead of 4.4%, the correct number is at least 34.4%. In 2021, it is at least 49.1%. Excluding gun-free zones, it averaged over 50%

 The Center for Crime Prevention Research corrects the FBI's statistics on the frequency of armed civilians stopping shooters.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

It appears that the FBI and the media are not credible sources for facts about the advantages of armed civilians.

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The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.

An analysis by my organization identified a total of 360 active shooter incidents during that period and found that an armed citizen stopped 124. A previous report looked at only instances when armed civilians stopped what likely would have been mass public shootings. There were another 24 cases that we didn’t include where armed civilians stopped armed attacks, but the suspect didn’t fire his gun. Those cases are excluded from our calculations, though it could be argued that a civilian also stopped what likely could have been an active shooting event.

The FBI reported that armed citizens thwarted 4.4% of active shooter incidents, while the CPRC found 34.4%.

Two factors explain this discrepancy – one, misclassified shootings; and two, overlooked incidents. Regarding the former, the CPRC determined that the FBI reports had misclassified five shootings: In two incidents, the Bureau notes in its detailed write-up that citizens possessing valid firearms permits confronted the shooters and caused them to flee the scene. However, the FBI did not list these cases as being stopped by armed citizens because police later apprehended the attackers. In two other incidents, the FBI misidentified armed civilians as armed security personnel. Finally, the FBI failed to mention citizen engagement in one incident.

For example, the Bureau’s report about the Dec. 29, 2019 attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, that left two men dead does not list this as an incident of “civic engagement.” Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional. He said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed that day, and they didn’t even keep track of who was carrying a concealed weapon.

As for the second factor — overlooked cases — the FBI, more significantly, missed 25 incidents identified by CPRC where what would likely have been a mass public shooting was thwarted by armed civilians. There were another 83 active shooting incidents that they missed.

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News outlets often raise concerns that allowing concealed handgun carry will result in innocent bystanders being shot or in police accidentally shooting permit holders. White’s AP dispatch on the Greenwood shooting quoted Adam Lankford, identified as “a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama,” who stated: “While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents. If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”

Professor Moody, who studies mass public shootings, notes that such warnings are misleading:

“The media and gun control advocates always seem concerned with the worst possible outcomes when firearms are involved. We know that armed citizens do, in fact, stop active shooters. And while there’s a possibility of a bystander getting hurt, the data put together by the CPRC show that an armed citizen has yet to accidentally shoot an innocent bystander. We also know that the police have accidentally shot the hero citizen just once. That was in Colorado on June 21, 2021. That’s not something that would normally happen, because the police usually arrive long after the incident is resolved.“

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What is particularly troubling is the unwillingness of the FBI and the media to correct these omissions when informed about them. When Dr. John Lott worked at the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and the Office of Justice Programs in 2020, the FBI was notified of their omissions involving potential mass public shootings, but they refused to correct those errors. Lott had previously alerted the FBI to similar problems back in 2015 and he published the list in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today in March 2015, but corrections were never made even after the FBI admitted they were missing cases.

When the CPRC emailed Ed White, the AP reporter who wrote that article, about the omissions in the Texas State numbers, he responded: “Our reporting, citing the specific research by Texas State U. over a 20-year period, was accurate. No correction was necessary.” The reporter did not need to take our word for these errors. A list of these cases and links to the news stories where mass public shootings were stopped was provided to him so that he could check out the omissions himself.

Sarah: An example of the damage done by today’s educational system

Don Boudreaux, one of the relatively few remaining educators talks with one of his students, Sarah.

Sarah's responses make clear how much damage to thinking our educational system has been doing. A large chunk of education today is indoctrination, not education, which has been so successful as to make many students opaque to facts and reason.

Your reaction to DB's report on his discussion with Sarah will tell a lot about your ability to place due emphasis on facts and reason.

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The opening lecture that I deliver every time I teach a Principles of Microeconomics course, which I do each semester, is on what the economic historian and liberal philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment.” I impress upon my students (most of whom are in their late teens) that they and everyone they know are off-the-charts materially wealthier than were the vast majority of all humans who ever lived. I explain that millennia after millennia, our human ancestors breathed, toiled, and perished in poverty so grinding that we today can barely imagine it.

This pattern of existence, when reckoned in historical time, was suddenly shattered just over two centuries ago. First in Holland, and then even more spectacularly in Britain, ordinary people gained steadily greater access to goods and services that in the past either were available only to royals, nobles, and members of high priestly classes, or – more commonly – weren’t available to anyone at all. Even Louis XIV, likely the most powerful man in the world, could not travel in motorized vehicles, escape from the heat of summer into air-conditioned rooms, converse in real time with people out of earshot, avoid having his face disfigured with smallpox, improve his vision with contact lenses or Lasik surgery, or treat his gonorrhea with antibiotics.

A key purpose of my intro econ course is to help my students understand that and how peaceful, commercial cooperation – today spanning the globe and involving billions of people nearly all of whom are strangers to each other – emerges to create and maintain our astonishing material prosperity.

Some students more than others resist my explanation of how. One such student – a freshman who I’ll call “Sarah” – came up to me after our most recent class and asked this question: “Isn’t our wealth the result of slavery?” She continued: “My high-school history teacher taught us that our wealth was extracted from slaves.” Sarah seemed to be convinced by her high-school teacher’s explanation.

Don to Sarah: “Yes, I’ve heard that claim, but I don’t buy it. How do you explain the fact slavery in America ended 157 years ago and ever since then the wealth of ordinary Americans has continued not only to grow, but to grow far more impressively than it did when slavery still existed. Think of what happened in the 20th century. Ordinary Americans got easy access to electrification, radio, television, automobiles, a continent-spanning network of paved roads, air travel, air conditioning, supermarkets, antibiotics, contact lenses, and laptops and smartphones. All of these pieces of prosperity were created long after slavery’s demise.”

Sarah to Don: “Yes, but these things were made possible by the wealth that whites extracted from slaves. Without the wealth produced by slaves and then stolen from them, we wouldn’t have had the foundation to produce what we did after slavery ended.”

Don: “American slaves worked overwhelmingly in agriculture. How did, say, cotton picked by slaves in Louisiana in 1860 turn 160 years later in Michigan into middle-class homes equipped with wi-fi, Google Home, and refrigerators stuffed with orange juice from Florida, pineapples from Hawaii, and sauvignon blanc from New Zealand?”

Sarah: “The wealth stolen from slave labor was eventually invested in factories that produced all these things.”

Don: “Not so. Consider, for example, Henry Ford. He was born into modest means on a Michigan farm in 1863 to a family with no history of slave-owning. What made him successful in business?”

Sarah: “You’re asking me?”

Don: “I am.”

Sarah: “I’m not sure. I don’t know the specifics.”

Don: “Henry Ford had entrepreneurial ideas. He also had the gumption and the freedom, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey says, ‘to have a go’ at putting his ideas into practice. Ford, like countless other lesser-known entrepreneurs, created wealth. Ford grew rich by dramatically increasing the efficiency of producing automobiles that the masses eagerly bought. His business success owed nothing to slavery.”

Sarah: “I get that he didn’t use slaves. But I feel that the capital to start his company probably came from wealth that had earlier been produced by slaves.”

Me: “First, the capital that first backed Ford came from a man named William H. Murphy. Born in 1855 in Maine, Murphy moved to Detroit where he and his father were successful in the lumber business. I’m pretty sure that post-Civil War Michigan lumbermen didn’t earn any income from slavery. Murphy, like Ford after him, created his wealth by running a successful business.

“Second, regardless of the source of the capital that Murphy invested in Ford’s new business, that investment would have been worth diddlysquat if Ford hadn’t had the vision, energy, and freedom to use those resources in ways that produced outputs that the masses wanted to buy and at costs low enough to make it worthwhile for Ford to continue to produce. This is what I mean when I say that Ford created wealth – wealth, obviously, for himself, but also for his customers in the form of automobiles that were worthwhile to purchase, and for his workers in the form of opportunities to earn incomes higher than they could have earned by working elsewhere.”

Sarah: “But I still feel that the seed money for all these later companies like Ford’s came from the slave economy that lasted in this country for centuries.”

Don: “Sarah, don’t feel. Think! Don’t you see that Ford created wealth? Don’t you see that he created value that didn’t exist until he put his entrepreneurial ideas into action? If Henry Ford could, without slavery – as you admit – turn some amount of wealth into a larger amount of wealth, why can’t other people have done the same, before and after Ford? Even if – contrary to fact – all of the seed money for the Ford Motor Co. happened to come from former slave owners, what created Henry Ford’s wealth and the valuable goods that he produced for millions of Americans was Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial vision and effort put into operation in an economy that permitted him to act entrepreneurially. No amount of resource-value grows into a larger amount of resource-value automatically.

“The ability of an entrepreneur to turn some amount of resource-value into greater resource-value doesn’t depend upon the source of the initial funding that the entrepreneur used to launch his or her venture. What matters is the entrepreneurship and the freedom of markets, which emphatically has nothing to do with slavery.”

Sarah: “I don’t know. Capitalism followed slavery. That must be significant.”

Me: “Do you remember my lecture from about three weeks ago in which I warned against the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy? You’re committing that fallacy now. You can’t legitimately conclude that if event A is followed by event B, that A caused B. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn’t. In fact, it’s possible that B happened despite, and not because of, A. Just because people leave their homes in the morning carrying umbrellas doesn’t mean that the rain that started later that day was caused by people carrying umbrellas.”

“Slavery was prevalent throughout human societies for millennia. If slavery was the cause of capitalism, don’t you think that capitalism would have started at least seven or eight thousand years ago? If slavery is the source of our prosperity today, why are not all countries in the world as rich as are the United States and Sweden? Do you realize that Brazil had slavery until 1888, nearly a quarter-century longer than the U.S. had slavery? Yet Brazilians have always been, and remain today, much poorer than Americans.”

Sarah: “I’m not convinced.”

Me: “Well, may I ask that you keep an open mind for the rest of this semester? Perhaps what’s still to come in our economics course will help you to better understand why I’m certain that modern prosperity has no connection whatsoever to slavery except that it is capitalism – and the ideas that support it – that brought about slavery’s demise.”

Sarah: “Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Good night, professor.”

Me: “Thanks Sarah. That’s all I can ask. Good night. See you in our next class.”