That’s Not How Any of That Works

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Part of the problem we have with the left’s fantasies is that they are very bad at world building.

I mean, you can see that in their movies and books. The number of books I’ve thrown against the wall because “this is not how any of this works” including the book where “because of global warming” Kansas was underwater but London wasn’t. Or the one where Space colonies were great because it was incredibly communist but Earth was in deep trouble because of being free trade. Or the one where– But truly, what’s the point? I’ve walled more leftist bad world building than I’ve read, and even so I tolerate a lot of bad world building.

But what you have to understand — No, seriously, as if the post leading to the semi-fisking of the last few days didn’t make that clear — is that to them the most ridiculous nonsense makes perfect sense, and that they think like that in real life too.

No, seriously. They’re all about the story, but if they’re given a “reason why” they never poke into it, see if it’s true, or even do the most basic elementary “wait, that doesn’t add up.” Ever.

Instead they decide that things are a problem/not a problem for some arbitrary reason and when the reason doesn’t materialize or have anything to do with it, they still decide it’s needed, because of … reasons.

Take their entire fixation with getting rid of cows. It all started with Diet For A Small Planet. I read it standing up in a bookstore, way back, fascinated at the sheer insanity of it.

Being, as I was, from a rural area, I could tell the person coming up with this theory had never, ever, not even in semi-lucid imaginings been near an agricultural region or had any idea how one grew food or cattle.

They had instead just done abstract math. They’d either read Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (I’m not sure, you know, if it was before or after the Diet bs and I’m not going to look it up. They’re both stupid.) And then they did the calculations on what cows eat and what humans eat, and had a brain storm: if only everyone just ate vegetables, we could feed a lot more people.

What they missed, of course, that any rural kid knows is that you don’t feed livestock on what humans can eat. Instead, you feed the stuff humans can’t eat, the stuff left after processing corn, or wheat or whatever to… well, you feed just about anything to pigs. But you can feed wheat straw to cows. And frankly, you can pasturage cows on land where you can’t grow anything. They’re not like goats, that you can feed on three tin cans and an old log, but they still can digest hard vegetable matter humans can’t eat.

In the US this is even more stark. A lot of land in the US west is really not good for agriculture. Too steep, too arid. In Colorado mostly full of scrub oak. In fact, unlike in good land in the east, in the west the land is likely to support fewer cows per acre. But it does support them. And humans can eat the cow, which is concentrated calories.

If everyone went vegetarian, we wouldn’t feed more people. We would instead have to put more land under the plow. In fact the entire dream of the insane left of sticking us all in stack a prol apartments makes perfect sense with this, except they think the rest of the world would be a natural preserve. In fact, we’d have to grow food everywhere. Including in the road medians.

But they don’t know this, and they fell in love with that idea. In the future, we’re overpopulated, and we all have to eat only plants.

Okay, so maybe they are too soft and get weirded out at eating moo cows. I’ve met some of those. Or perhaps they just don’t like the idea of people raising these huge animals.

But you know the real reason they fell in love with that idea so much? Because when they read this as teens, they thought it was brilliant and made perfect sense. They told people that and people kept laughing at them. So in their heads they decided they were too smart for the world, and the world would see they were right when everyone had to go vegetarian, not to starve.

Only, you know? Turns out the population bomb was a fizzle. And the need for vegetarianism never became a thing.

So now they’re old (most of them are older than I) and they are determined to make everyone eat the plants (and the bugs) and to ban cows, because they still have this vision in their heads, and they want to make sure that everyone does the thing they said they would do, back when they read the world’s stupidest books.

In the same way, they’ve been enchanted with “climate change” for decades now. I remember hearing people older than I cackling about all those idiots (read people more successful than them and who didn’t fall for the just so stories of the doom mongers) would be sorry when the world was under water 20 years ago.

Like Diet For A Small Planet — or Marxism — it is the sort of system that is self-verifying inside the system, and as long as you don’t leave the system is completely logical. You know, in a world where cows eat the same humans eat, and where all land is equally arable, and in which humans are reproducing like bunnies, Diet for a Small Planet would be true. If this sounds like “If ifs and ans were pots and pans, everyone could cook,” it’s because it is. The climate models are the same thing, except on computers. If you keep inside the model, then the model is right. If you assume that all the factors possible went into the model, then … well, we’d already be baking or something.

Except of course, the models can’t even predict past weather. But for the people enchanted by the models and convinced it makes them smarter than other people and/or who see in these models a way to power and to stop all ‘the idiots’ who don’t believe these things from being wealthy, it’s easy to put hands over ears and go ‘lalalalalalala.’

Which brings us to the idea that the left does everything to an exact plan and they’re keeping their plan and —

It’s not that simple. It’s not even that close to that simple. It’s more that yes, they want power and they grab at everything as a vehicle of power.

But they also believe these things, because it’s part of how their minds work. Even the ones “at the top”, even the ones in on concocting the lie end up buying it, because it allows them to think of themselves as insightful and brilliant, and also caring. They’re saving the world. Or keeping people from starving, or whatever.

Hints of these confused thoughts come through periodically, like when John Kerry said we needed to stop traditional agriculture, or people would starve. At the bottom of that incoherent idiocy was Diet For A Small Planet that some portion of Lurch either thinks it’s real or wishes were real.

And then we get to their happy fun idea that Global Warming (hear the capitals) would submerge islands and destroy agriculture across the world, and there would be “climate refugees.” They were deathly serious about it.

Of course, it didn’t happen, the same way that overpopulation didn’t happen. Because, well, the world might be warming (not noticeably for about a decade, but whatever) but these things aren’t computer models and in the real world these things don’t happen immediately, in movie-schedule. So, no, nothing is submerged, and no patterns of agriculture have changed.

But hey, if you open the borders, and get various shady NGOs and commie fronts to ship the world to our Southern border, you can claim — and tell yourself — that these are “climate refugees.”

Of course, as a rich country, who profited from the thing that made the warmering, we should look after all the refugees. Notice their insistence in calling them “refugees.” These aren’t invaders, sent in to be their wrecking ball on America. No, they’re refugees caused by our greed and capitalism (everything is caused to capitalism. Is there anything it can’t do?) And look how kind the left is looking after them in our hotels, schools and… airports?

Mayorcas said that because the left absolutely believes this. Partly because they very much want to. And they fail to realize it is the most absolute, utter garbage.

No? Well, tell me what parts of America are now under water? None, you say? In fact, wealthy lefties keep buying sea side property?

What magic is this? How come we have sea-shore privilege and the sea only goes up where the poors littlez brownz peoplez live? Nefarious of us, isn’t it?

What about climate change destroying agriculture? Look, there are droughts and floods around the world at any given time. Like, South Africa in the eighties in some places had people who were 18 and had never seen rain. (Or didn’t remember seeing rain. Don’t quote it. I read the article, but it was a long time ago. It might have been in Dutch, which tells you how long ago it was.) And we remember that California had floods — Australia too — in recent years. And our midwest is dry-ish in spots. But all this is part of the normal swings of weather, and no, they’re not really causing that much of a disruption in any nation much less in all the nations these supposed “refugees” came from.

Again, our land doesn’t have some kind of capitalist privilege. No one has built a shield over America. If climate were so bad in so many regions, we’d also already be starving, or at least having serious trouble growing anything. Even cows on scrub oak.

So, you know? All of this is nonsense.

They view the world through a half formed network of dreams, all of these dreams being really nightmares for everyone else, and designed to make them look like heroes and geniuses.

It’s important to know where they’re coming from, and what is going on in their brains, and how they’re guzzling their own ink, and how it poisons them.

But ultimately? Ultimately their lies and idiocy.

And not only are we not required to let them drag us backwards into their insanity, it is our duty to point out it’s insane, and has no contact with anything but the fantasies of their deranged brains.

And it’s important to keep this in mind and refuse their language which leads to their insanity. These are not “refugees” even if they come from countries with profoundly bad governments. No, they’re illegal immigrants, or border jumpers, or, if you prefer, commie advance guerillas (at least the military age ones.)

Be not afraid. Hold on to the truth, and keep telling it.

In the end, we win, they lose.

288 thoughts on “That’s Not How Any of That Works”

    1. wall has been a verb for readers since forever. These days I don’t wall books, since I mostly read them on the kindle. but I’ve been known to stab the “return” button so hard it leaves a blister. (For KU. I don’t buy unless I’m fairly sure I’ll like it, and don’t return if I made a mistake, because I wouldn’t if it were on paper.)

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    2. Ask any good NCO about counseling a problem enlisted man, and he can demonstrate “walled” as a verb.

      “Wall to Wall counseling”

      My Samoan Drill Sergeant stated he preferred to give such counseling in an APC.

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          2. Also the continent is tilting. Because there is no longer a mile of ice on top of Canada, which made North America tilt the other direction until the ice melted.

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    1. Putting on my tinfoil hat, I believe the Lone Star Tick was bred and bio-engineered and released on North America by globalists in order to make Americans allergic to red meat. They say it’s for the environment but they really do it because they think we’re uppity peasants who don’t know our place. After all peasants don’t eat red meat, at least not every day, only aristocrats do that. The peasants labor at a nutritional and mental disadvantage for their betters because they’re weaker and more stupid.

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      1. “Putting on my tinfoil hat,”

        After the WuFlu, it’s not exactly tinfoil material. And like all terrorists, they only have to be lucky ONCE.

        These two represent Leftists perfectly, in attitude, competence…. and what will have to be done with them.

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      2. The “uppity peasants” point is definitely a thing, I’ve observed. You can see the attitude going back quite a while.

        Remember the articles a few years back decrying the “sushi economy?” I’m pretty sure what they were really knicker-twisted about was the fact that the oiks out in Bug Tussle now had access to and could afford at least acceptable sashimi. How are they supposed to show the oiks what their place is?

        Now they’ve moved on to red meat and personal transportation.

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        1. The Leftroids hate non-electric vehicles because they -produce- power instead of consuming it.

          To the degree you -produce- above consumption you have freedom and power. A pure consumer is a client and must be obedient, or go without.

          Net Production moves you up. Net Consumption moves you down. Produce more than you consume, sustained over a lifetime, and ultimately you become wealthy.

          Opposing you, the Leftroids either prohibit production an/or confiscate it, so you stay net consumer, thus net impoverished.

          Thus net obedient.

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  4. More than just raising kids, herding them in sports, religious or civic organizations, leads me to the conclusion that talking isn’t enough to change behavior in single or group situations. A spanking, quick right to the left jaw, or forced sprints ‘til you drop are mandatory forms of inducing change in behavior. We have failed at being the parents of these evil brats who are destroying our culture, society and country as we have not gone beyond scolding.

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    1. We have failed at being the parents of these evil brats who are destroying our culture, society and country as we have not gone beyond scolding.

      The problem is exactly that “we” have collectivized the failure.

      I know a lot of folks who are abject losers. And a lot more who somehow turned out great, some of them in spite of being spoiled into what should be utter destruction.

      I got lots of punishments that were suited to other folks, generally from people who’d failed to actually raise their own brats so were now taking it out on me. It was…counter-productive, at best. Especially if their brats were the other half of the situation, and the aggressors, and still didn’t get any kind of consequences because[insert reason here].

      Various authorities have failed to seek justice, and instead go from being too lazy to do their job at all, to doing a bad job of it because hey, doing a good job takes WORK!

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        1. Once upon a time teaching was a noble if underpaid profession. These days it’s become infested with child hating elites looking for a cushy gubmint job with great benefits and retirement plans. The actions of teachers and more pointedly their unions during the pandemic chitshow makes my case.

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      2. Never raised a hand to our (admittedly one) child. Used timeout, and consequences, latter at an older age and often self triggered. Timeouts worked for him (never would have worked for me) because forced inactivity to calm down was punishment.

        Consequences, two stand out examples, both involving broken arms requiring splints (so not horribly bad, just limiting). First one caused by falling when rollerskating down a ramp at school. Image of the handicapped ramps off sidewalks, right? No. The school slide (at least he had helmet and kneepads on, but no wrist braces. Might not have helped anyway, but.) Penalty for bad decision? He had been invited to play fall ball with Little League type baseball league, which could have gotten him on the spring team. Guess what he had to decline? Following year, he broke the other arm learning that all important physics lesson that when your bike stops unplanned suddenly, you don’t. Consequence. None. In fact we went out of our way to find out how we could get him to play flag football, with the understanding that sometimes life isn’t fair. This time it was.

        He got to learn the “life isn’t fair” when he was 12. He’d taken a hardball to his left eye, cracking (very, very, lucky) the lower orbital bone and had to have surgery to pull the eye out of the crack (on his birthday) and before summer camp. Meant he couldn’t swim without eye goggles (short term restriction, just was still under that restriction as of camp) which meant he couldn’t take the boating meritbadge offered (had to be able to swim without the goggles if boat capsized or fell out).

        Not the only examples, but the ones that stand out. To the point that with other scouts, and sports, he would tell not only the other youth but parents, that we did outline consequences we could follow through on. Granted most were “see item #x on the forms you signed”. Example:

        What happens if kid misses practice unexcused (and mom/dad couldn’t be bothered that day, doesn’t count. Better be sick.) Lose place in lineup at next game, go to the end of the line. Could mean bench warming time. Applied equally. “But your son never misses practice!” Duh. Coach’s son wouldn’t.

        What happens if kid hides food in sleeping bag, or backpack, at camp (or why there are pack inspections, and packs packed in rigs two days before leaving. Still can’t stop them from buying stuff at camp store and not using the safe storage provided.) Damaged personal equipment. Yes, there was parental screaming. What part of the raccoons are the size of small big dogs (seriously, those things are huge at Baker) and there are bears (resident sow, with cubs, was relocated before camp opened, at Baker). Baker area has cougars and bobcats too. Watched a Reece’s Peanut Buttercup package go flitting down through the brush. Package bigger than the ground squirrel that had scored it. Fell off the chair I was sitting on laughing so hard.

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        1. Um. Holy crud. I can safely say that wasn’t a consequence in any camp I’ve been to, in Ohio or even Pennsylvania.

          We did have raccoons who performed a skit of cuteness in front of the picnic shelter, to attempt to distract our Girl Scout troop from the raccoons stealing our stuff from the back of the shelter. But alas for them, they weren’t quite cute enough.

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          1. One story we told before camp was the time troop went to Baker (weekend, not summer camp). Had a cooler we tied under the seat part of the table to the table legs so it couldn’t be pulled out and opened. That is where we had the scouts, adults, put their lunches in for the hike the next day. Except the scoutmaster and his son, who left it in dad’s day pack, set in the middle of the dad’s tent. Guess who did not have lunch that day. Only one lunch disappeared out of the pack. The raccoons pulled the pack out the back of the tent (canvas platform tents), unzipped the pack (not ripped into, unzipped), and pulled out the one lunch (why not both, ???). Did not hear a thing (dad/scoutmaster is hubby). Did not let hubby forget, ever. Okay, he always tattled on himself as the “yes, this happens”.

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            1. The dreaded mini-bears.

              Philmont has bears and mountain lions.
              But the most camper food damage comes from mini-bears, primarily squirrels and chipmunks.
              Philmont rangers would tell tales of the south country vs north country mini-bears – one end of the camp had smart but slow mini-bears, the other end had fast but dumb mini-bears. The rangers feared the day that the two populations cross-breed.

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              1. I adore creative safety briefings. Be the briefings be airline crew, park rangers, or BSA staff and scouters.

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        2. Following year, he broke the other arm learning that all important physics lesson that when your bike stops unplanned suddenly, you don’t. Consequence. None.

          Wrong: consequence, broken arm.

          Y’know, an actual “natural consequence”, not “we’ll make something up and call it natural”.

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          1. True. Worded incorrectly. Should have said no punishment consequences other than the physical consequences of the broken arm.

            In addition on the first broken arm, his additional punishment was when asked he had to tell how he broke it. Reason? Not to be mean or rub in the stupidity action (okay, that too) but because when he was 5 he slipped playing street basketball cracking his little finger and what happened at the urgency clinic. Got asked “what happened” at the front desk. He got asked by the front desk, the nurses asked what happened, the doctors asked what happened. I offered to step out so they could ask him what happened without me in the room. They got the message. It was a freaking accident. With his arms? Both times. When he told the stories, they asked once. I understand what the medical personnel were doing. Irritating. But understandable. I wasn’t there for the “what happened” for the initial orbital bone crack, but 12 year old plus hard ball practice drills, the coach (dad) with him, suspect it wasn’t grill time. (I was at the monthly scouter district meeting. Took the cell call because dad wouldn’t be calling except in an emergency. “Where is the pediatric urgent clinic?” Which we still had in the area back then. Now standard urgent clinic is what everyone uses VS emergency room if possible.)

            One of his classmates was playing around on the playground equipment, climbed on top of the monkey bars and fell off, breaking (not just compression fractures son had) both arms, spiral fractures. Before he was out of the casts she was ready to get him a tshirt that read “It happened at school at recess!” Not only that but his twin helped him hide what had happened. The clue the parents triggered on, and since we were told how we knew son had a problem immediately, was the kid wouldn’t grab his shoes or anything. It hurt to close his hands. Compression fracture wasn’t any different than a spiral fracture in this symptom.

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        3. I told a friend once (after a child meltdown) that her children needed discipline. Her response: You lay a hand on my kid I’ll see you in jail.

          My response to her: Is that the only kind of discipline you know?

          She shut up.

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          1. My response to parents trying to reason with a meltdown child is “You are arguing with a 2 (baby, toddler, young child) year old, and losing!” Usually gets the parent to do something else. If I see a crying child in the store but parent isn’t trying to reason with them, just shopping to get done? They get a sympathic “Tired kid? Been there.”

            My response to son was “Scream away. You are just wasting time.” Usually a meltdown meant tired kid. Don’t believe meltdown means getting your way. Son learned to not have meltdowns. Also meant probably asleep in the car before I got the car loaded, let alone home (we are only 2 miles from the store). Hard on me. Hard on him.

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            1. She was arguing with a five year old.

              At the grocery store I often see kids crying. I ask them if they hear that noise. Shuts them right up. Then the noise magically stops. 😂

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            2. Something I have to explain to folk from time to time is the difference between a meltdown (something autistic folk have to deal with more often than others generally) and a tantrum. A tantrum is a manipulation technique, an attempt to get one’s way. A meltdown is an expression of distress, the emotional equivalent of having one’s spleen carved out with a rusty spoon.

              I’ve learned to suppress incipient meltdowns to an extent. Unfortunately, that’s something I pay for later and, if done too much or too often can lead to longer term issues like shutdown or burnout.

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        4. It’s the squirrels that are the biggest issue, honestly. Raccoons are scary big, but squirrels are everywhere. Had a leader lose a pack to squirrels from a package of cough drops, and that one wasn’t even her being stupid, it was checking in a day early because they needed an over-21 female leader so the female staff members didn’t have to leave campº, and dropping her pack somewhere so she could check in.

          ºSure glad they didn’t have that rule when I was camp staff. I would have had to leave every weekend for my entire four summers. And note, they’d had one, but she’d left for family reasons.

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      1. Mom (who ran decidedly “left”) had a “pacifist” phase when I was a young teenager, and tried to turn me into one. After increasingly outrageous behaviors by local nincompoops, we both came to realize that perhaps Malcom X had a point.

        The change was rather abrupt, from the thugs’ point-of-view. (ex: mumbled through a lip-busted mouth) “Hey! He hit me back!” There were a few others before the dummkopfs caught on and stayed out of reach. (An Army Artillery veteran neighbor had taught me the value of the “sucker punch” and how to sucker them. “Fair fight means you effed up.”)

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        1. We told our son he had the right to defend himself, or another. We’d deal with the consequences. Only got called to the principle once. Story I heard from the parent of the kid being bullied was son stepped between bully and bullied. Son’s story to us, and the principle, was “I just walked between them. Didn’t notice anything going on.” Kid wasn’t stupid. Stopped that incident. Got the house egged. Stopped that cold. I called parents. Got very little push back from the parent (who we knew, kid went sideways. Long term? Do not know.)

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        1. They’re not mutually exclusive (“embrace the power of ‘and’ “), but I suspect you’re neither, just pissed off like the rest of us. ;-)

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      3. I am quite interested in your upcoming post. I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that curbing legitimate violence has been A Problem.

        Matched with my suspicion that we ought to make sure everyone gets taught self-defense, the bullies already learn how to hurt people.

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        1. Oh, but you see, “That would be putting an ambulance at the bottom of the hill rather than a fence at the top.” Just teach the bullies not to be bullies. Problem solved.

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        2. RE: “legitimate” violence – the Left is incapable of distinguishing between positive violence and negative violence, and has compounded the problem by applying monetary inflation principles to the definition of violence (which seems to be their default position on the definitions of everything).

          This is why, to them, self defense is worse than the original infraction which prompted the self defense response, and why FAFO is such a foreign concept. Looking forward to your upcoming post.

          Somewhere near the middle of my way too large “to read” stack are three books: Facing Violence by Rory Miller, When Violence is the Answer by Tim Larkin and The Big Bloody Book of Violence by Lawrence Kane. Maybe I’ll move them to the top.

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          1. “self defense is worse than the original infraction”

            “WHAT original infraction, peasant? Your betters’ chastisement is what you deserved. How DARE you?!?”

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            1. Then there’s the ‘Your speech (or somtimes, depending on the situation, lack of speech) is violence, my violence is speech.’ crowd. If you’re using violence to say something, whatever it may be, all I’m hearing is “Shoot Me!” The fact that I do not do so is a testament to my self control by the grace of God.*

              While filling my gas tank this morning, the clerk was railing on (and on) about “Biden killing my relatives in Palestine.” I sense that this will not end well.

              That was originally (mis)typed ‘the grave of God.’ And yes, that too.

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          2. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue. and thoroughly immoral, doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”

            in Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

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          3. I have been thinking along these same lines recently. It seems like there are many people who refuse to accept the difference between non-aggression and non-violence.

            I have noticed it particularly with some of the more doctrinaire libertarians I follow in light of recent events in Israel. They seem so obsessed with hating any and all state institutions that they fail to see that the State of Israel is fulfilling the primary legitimate role of government, which is to protect citizens from outside attacks.

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  5. IIRC it can be up to 300 acres to raise one cow in some places in the west. That’s why some federally leased grazing range is so cheap. You rent 300 acres and after two years you get one cow.

    Just out of curiousity, has anyone ever actually laid out the “hows” of raising bugs to eat? I mean if one cow can provide me with meat for a year or so (totally guessing but I’ll eat more beef if necessary to prove myself right), how many bugs is that and where are they going to be raised? How big will the bug farms have to be?

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    1. I don’t remember much at all of what she SAID, but the “I ate a bug” lady that sells crickets at the Iowa State Fair was delighted to give stats. For a place for someone to start digging. (She gives stickers to folks who eat a cricket.)

      As for how much beef, it very much depends on what you’re eating, but my family of 9 (kids from 14 to 1, none of the boys are teens yet) gets a beef a year. If we weren’t supplementing, I think we’d go through 2.

      I can geek out a lot on the details of the cow, but it’d only be interesting to other beef folks; they’re “medium average” Iowa pasture raised and grain (corn) finished beef breed cows, not exceptional on any of the stats, but very good meat.

      I think that’d be about four, five adult’s worth, so figure half a beef per person per year.

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      1. Have family who farmed down in Fremont country, family has been farming for generations. Just east of the Loess Hills.

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      2. Nice weather today, balmy out one could say, at least compared to next week. It will be interesting when the Iowa caucus happens next week. How all this global warming will affect the turn out. Will all those anti-Trumpers actually go out to caucus when they know it is a forgone conclusion, or stay home and stay warm. Not to mention all the hazards of driving during global warming. sarc.

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          1. They should know farmers are very dedicated to begin with, you have to be to work a farm. My uncle had a saying, ‘Tomorrow is Today Yesterday’. Might as well do it today, they’ll be something else tomorrow, he then would mutter a lot.

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        2. We’re caucusing, used to be January 3. The snow will have to be over a foot deep to stop the farm trucks. Hopefully the Dems that intend to support Nikki won’t brave the cold😜

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      3. Also remember older people eat less. How much less is shocking the heck out of us, as empty nesters. No, seriously. It has made going out to eat once a week acceptable, even if we get out fro around $30 with tip. How? Well, because we bring back TWO meals. Two days I don’t need to cook and get an hour more of work. It’s….. weird.
        Now I might need to make rice or veggies the third day. but still!

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            1. If you want a really awesome rice cooker, it’s zojirushi. (Brand, also makes a coffee pot we adore.)

              If you want something that does a good job of cooking rice and a bunch of other stuff, Aroma Multicookers. They’ve got some that are basically “light weight crockpots that can also be programed to make rice”, for a third of the price. Some even have a yogurt setting, not that I’ve tried it.

              Actually, the Aroma ones look like a joke.
              “Rice, grains, slowcooker, soup, steam, sauté, make a cake and yogurt!”

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              1. We’ve had both, and I bought the ARC-5000SB Digital Rice, Food Steamer, Slow, Grain Cooker, Stainless Exterior/Nonstick Pot, 10-cup uncooked/20-cup cooked/4QT twice so far. Second one was almost four years ago, and because the kids had destroyed the lining on the pot for the other. It still works…after being repeatedly dropped on the floor….

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      4. Do you get a whole cow a year, or parts? If you’re getting a whole or half, how do you store it?

        I’d like to do that, but I’d have to convince the wife. She does not like feeling weighed down by stuff or fixed assets.

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        1. We buy the cow, pay the processing fee at the butcher, and pick up the stuff cut to our requirements; we have a chest freezer to store it in, and that makes it so our grocery bill is much lower because I can do stuff like buy three pork roasts when they’re on sale, not “what we’ll use and maybe a shoebox more”.

          I was persuaded by “all the cuts of beef for less than ground beef on sale,” myself.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. We are getting our semi-annual quarter cow delivered tomorrow from a relatively local rancher. One chest freezer, one beverage refrigerator with a top freezer box in garage and one kitchen fridge our current storage is never overflowing; there’s another rancher that comes by irregularly we also get about a quarter cow from once or twice a year. All grass fed. Very delicious. Not particularly economical but not far from prices of garbage the local chains sell. The local Mexican market is also a great source of meat, Veggies and home baked goods.
            Must Eat Meat!

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            1. Beef for 1/4, rates was right at $5/#, which is what we pay for Costco 12% ground.

              Pork for 1/2, rate was $4/#. Note, that is what I pay at Costco for ribs when we get them. Pepper bacon, been paying $5.29/# at Fred Meyers deli.

              My problem was while we go through a lot of ground round, and some steaks, we don’t get a lot of different cuts. Ditto on the pork. Pork, if we could get just ribs, bacon, and sausage (which we can use, but don’t otherwise buy), then maybe. That and the beef and pork we’ve gotten, while good, were very, very, fatty. So we’ve quit doing this.

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                1. If we were that far from Costco or Fred Meyers (Kroger) we would too.

                  If it matters, we have a 8 cuft chest freezer. Plenty of room.

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              2. Which is what market is supposed to handle.

                We end up taking a lot of our fancier cuts to big family gatherings so folks get steak on a hotdog budget (and I don’t feel guilty about not cooking when we’re a solid third of the crowd) but it is a consideration.

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              3. Anything I wouldn’t use got turned into burger. The locker went over the cut list with me and I chose what cuts I wanted.

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                1. Pork we could choose our own cuts because we got 1/2. Beef we had to coordinate the cuts with the other 1/4 of our shared half. We had multiple costs associated with the meat: Raise the animal, slaughter, cut and wrap, and finally carcass disposal fee.

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    2. Oh I think the plan for eating bugs is you eating the ones you find in your yard. Not enough bugs, oh well, you die. THATS what they really want anyway.

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    3. The non-irrigated scrub land in Flyover County is usually (waggles hand) good for a pair (Cow and calf) on 10 acres. The neighbor who is raising beef cattle for other neighbors was able to get three cows on his 40-60 acres of pastureland, but when he did 6 the next year, he had to bring in hay until the cattle could be moved to a river-front pasture. Lots of good grass.

      Batch 1 yielded some nice beef, though my teeth are no longer all natural well suited for grilled steaks. Pork for the win!

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      1. We had 400 acres of land tied up in an inheritance dispute behind our last house in Colorado. In writing I referred to it as a natural preserve, because it was. It’s been disputed for 90 years, and well…. you know?
        We had mountain lions, giant bucks, etc. behind there. And a plethora of coyotes, which is why the neighborhood had no outdoor pets except Ace, who I think led a coyote pack. (Hey, he belonged to a Marine, you know…)
        BUT somehow by some arrangement, someone pastured cows in it. I don’t know how many per acre, but that was POOR land. We were at enough altitude I couldn’t grow any flowers, pretty much at all, and our neighbors had landscaped with “native plants” that were spiky and ugly. (And a lot of rocks.)
        The land behind us was mostly scrub oak and spiky stuff. The herd, depending on season, varied between 40 and 100. (My husband named them. He found watching the cows way too much fun. He’s not a rural boy.)
        Weirdly (?) they weren’t much bothered by coyotes and mountain lions. not sure why not, but there it is.

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        1. There have been a couple of incidents where horses or cattle were attacked and killed, though there are enough wolves (and known dog-wolf, plus unknown coy-wolf hybrids) to confuse the issue.

          The regional mountain lion seems to prefer wildlife; we’re not the SF bay area where hiking trails intersect cat paths. (That and if any cougar gets too frisky around here, the SSS rule comes into play.)

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        2. On a lot of that high, dry land it’s acres per cow, not cows per acre.

          As for the coyotes and cougars, cows are big and heavy and they kick hard. Too much work. Cows, like horses and pigs, are an invasive species on this continent.

          Too bad aurochs are extinct. Now those were some cows.

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          2. And if you add a couple of donkeys or mules to the herd, it gets to be possibly fatal work. They regularly stomp / bite to death coyotes here; I don’t think I’ve seen any stories involving cougar or bobcats.

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            1. Locally some shepherds have added llamas to the herds to supplement guardian dogs in the fields (sheep are moved from temporary field to temporary field, but not taken into mountains, and no people stay with the sheep). I guess there have been reports of very surprised cougars and coyotes (wolves haven’t migrated into Willamette valley, yet). While both hunt llamas where non-domestic llamas are natural, the northern cousins aren’t as familiar with them. Alpacas aren’t as threatening even though they are the same size as donkeys. The donkeys, mules, llamas, and guard dogs, aren’t as effective unless the sheep, cattle, goats, are confined together to a specific non-feed lot field area. Not effective when allowed free range. Sheep and goats may graze on grazing allotments but they are never free range, attended by a shepherd with herding dogs, and the guardian animals.

              Also there is starting to be some reported *evidence that horses never fully died out in the Americas (very uphill climb getting that evidence accepted by PTB). Which is one reason why northern cougars have no problem hunting them. At a minimum that when the horse ancestor died out, there left a missing ecological niche that the modern horse fills, at least in the west. It is being proven that wild horse herds mitigate vegetation that limits wildfire damage. Speculation too of a missing predator that regularly hunted American Pronghorn. Most dangerous thing to an adult pronghorn is vehicles.

              ((*)) Does not mean domestically raised horses can survive wild. Especially specialty breeds. Not anymore than orphaned cougar or wolf cubs can be raised by humans and rewild (at least at this point). Orphaned black bear cubs and bobcats kittens are being successfully raised and rewilded, with limited human contact through the raising process. There is a pilot where a non-profit is trying with grizzly cubs, jury is out there still.

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              1. Yes, the ranches with watch llamas or dogs tend to be fairly small (the largest is a couple hundred acres). I don’t know what the really big operations use, though I’ve heard .223 fired from a varmint rifle does a good job at keeping the coyotes well behaved. “Good boy. Now play dead!”

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              2. With respect to the grizzly cubs, we’re speculating that a fair number will disappear, rather like the wolves with an appetite for a ticked-off rancher’s cattle.

                And nobody saw a thing.

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                  1. One of the wolves that disappeared did so in the vicinity of several small lakes. He had been wearing a radio collar, but the notion that water can make a decent Faraday shield is not lost on many people.

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            2. A few of the local ranchers use watch llamas, though neighboring ranches use anything from donkeys to Great Pyrennees for critter control.

              OTOH, the alpaca operation seems to be gone.

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      2. Official designation for livestock grazing leases on public lands is: Animal type, mom and baby, per acres. EX: Cow Acres. High desert good grazing is Cow/10-acres. Willamette valley or coastal western Oregon is Cow/0.25-acres, or less.

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    4. Having had a Leopard Gecko for younger daughter crickets (and mealworms) are familiar to me. To be honest having had to keep fricking crickets alive to feed said lizard I want NOTHING to do with the nasty little creatures, They smell bad, die easily and honestly aren’t even a complete diet for a leopard gecko (you need to coat the darned crickets with vitamin powder).

      Looking at calories (note food calories are Kcalories) Crickets are 120-130 Kcal/100g. Beef (85/15 ground beef) is 250Kcal/100g. An average adult male needs ~2000 Kcal/day. A dressed out steer runs about 490 lbs yield and that’s 222260g (222.26Kg) for ~555650 kcal or about 278 days of food for an average male (feeding them ONLY beef some of us would be willing to take one for the team and try that). At 130 Kcal/100 grams of cricket you need ~427423g(427.423 Kg a little over 942 pounds) of cricket to feed a human for the same period(no not volunteering for that one). At 8 g/cricket that is 53,427 crickets (give or take a couple) to one steer. Even those raising crickets for Gecko/reptile fodder probably rarely yield more than 10000 lbs a year of cricket, that’s food for 10 humans for a year (give or take). Oh and all those crickets poop CONSTANTLY (that’s part of why the fricking things smell awful) and generate methane. Oh, and they breathe O2 and exhale CO2 (they’re animals just like the cows but neither as tasty nor as easy to raise). Our brahmandarins are NOT serious people (but hell we knew that) and their goal is simply to starve and cause misery for their presumed inferiors n ot to actually improve anything (we also knew that).

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      1. There y’go, using facts again! We all know facts are irrelevant; it’s all feeelz. Plus, of course, “Get back down where you belong, serf!”. :-x

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    5. It really does depend on the location of the land in question. My stepmom was raised on a farm in CA. Her father raised grapes for raisins as their cash crop. They also had a milk cow or two, chickens, pigs, a couple of horses and large veggie garden that fed a family of 7 quite well. All on 5 acres.

      My Dad’s family in North Dakota had a section of land, 640 acres. They rented extra for pasture for their 40 head of dairy cows. In dry years they still had to buy hay.

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      1. In the region I grew up in you ACTUALLY can feed a family on veggies, fruit and chicken on an acre. (My family is unduly impressed by my over an acre plot. “Oh, you bought a farm.”) I thought that was normal.

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        1. Yes. Having grown up in the Dakotas/Montana/Wyoming I was shocked when she told me that their “farm” was only 5 acres. She had told me previously her dad was one of the bigger land owners in the area. So I was expecting square miles not 5 measly acres. LOL

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          1. Hubby jokes that he was gypped out of the “Salmon Fleet” all because he my parents commercial fished for salmon off mid Oregon coast (Windy Cove south of Reedsport). They had one boat, with two people manning it (them). Actually one pilot (dad), and one working the nets (mom), because most the years they fished it was after dad’s stroke. Yes, he knew before we were serious that it was only one boat and at best they broke even on the fishing. But salmon fishing all summer :-)

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        2. Not sure you could do that in New England, especially coastal Connecticut which is essentially part of the glacial moraine that formed Long Island (best crop is rocks…). Maternal Grandfather was a small (10-12 cows) in the 30’s and into WWII. Although he had 2 strapping sons to help (well not after 1942 elder son went off to the Navy, though came back). Even during that time, he did LOTS of part-time work (Electrical Lineman, worked at a factory that made the Magnesium for photographic flashes) in that period. Had a truck garden of maybe an acre that supplemented the food and grew LOTS of roots and similar. I think after WWII it wasn’t particularly money-making and I suspect even in the 30’s he’d stayed in it because it was income. You could feed a family with the aforementioned strapping young boys.

          My experience is most of NE is very rocky and when the chance to move west to better soil for farming lots of folk did. You can tell this as New England was farms with open fields in the 19th century. but when I was a lid almost any forested area you walked in had stone walss (to confine animals especially cows) all over the place. By the end of WWII farming in New England became much more specialized sticking with animal crops, fruit trees and things with short growing seasons.

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    6. The German settlers who came to Texas with the Adelsverein in the 1840s discovered that, to their sorrow. They were promised grants of land on the Texas frontier, which was in the Hill country (granite hills) or in high Llano (grassy, but Comanche hunting grounds) of so many acres per single man or per family – land which would have meant nearly unimaginable riches for a German farmer at the time — in Germany! But alas, as it turned out, the Texas land was no good for the farming style they were accustomed to … in fact, it was better used as grazing, and over much larger acreages. Eventually, a fair number of the German settlers wised up and went to herding cattle, sheep and merino goats.

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      1. A lot of the “go vegetarian to save the planet” types are mentally picturing European-style land. That is, they’re thinking of restricted acreage and plenty of water. Invert that, and you get pasture (or hunting) cultures.

        Honestly, you can tell the climate of an area from the historical diet. You get your carnivores in dry climates (think of how many herding animals are staples of a Middle Eastern diet.) You get your rice in wet climates, like southeast Asia. Cows are kind of an outlier beast in that you can do them in both, but it gives you an idea.

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    7. If we could fix the chicken and egg issue on bison ( too expensive for more sales, not enough sales to justify larger herds, not even bison to lower prices) we’d get better meat yield out west and use less water. They are optimized in a way cattle still ain’t for the American plains.

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    1. Precisely.
      Speaking on, I don’t feel like hunting it down and responding to your comment a few posts ago. My comment on the best universities was no disparagement on those that attended. Francis Turner, You, Professor Reynolds are all people I respect. Though we all know there are ways and ways to get into the ivies, and some are more likely to turn out well than others, but still.
      I was not in the US, but in my own way I went to the most prestigious institution of learning around. AND if I’d not chosen to drop stop and get married — cut mom’s voice “Like a bimbo” — I’d have a doctorate from a US ivy. (I’d got the acceptance letter.)
      The thing is this is the reason I’d trust common working people better in government.
      By my time, so likely by yours, since we’re much of an age, except in pockets, academics had become a thing of abstract reasoning and bad theory piled on bad theory. It could be good and even brilliant in academic fields, but these people’s theorizing on the real world in bull sessions scared the cr*p out of me.
      Partly — I have a friend from rural PA similarly educated, and he had the same reaction — because I came from a working-class village, even if my people were always educated (even the women could read and write fluently! And knew history!) I knew that working class people were smart enough to choose their interest, so the theory that said they were stupid and choosing against interest was hogwash. And more importantly, I KNEW WHERE FOOD CAME FROM and who built the houses, and how. And ideas of the noble savage never took, because I knew feral village boys. So…. No disparagement of people automatically for where they learned, but disparagement of the bubble that choosing only from “the best institutions” allows to form in government.

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      1. I took no offense. I entirely agree with you. I do think an “elite” education helps one to realize just how useless an “elite” education can be. An elite education is mostly about class and the opportunities class provides.

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        1. Precisely on that elite education.
          LOL. You probably get what I mean when I say when I chose to marry Dan I lost all my connections. My ticket to the upper class was not what I’d LEARNED but all my connections.
          If I’d stayed there — or finished a doctorate in the US and gone back — I’d be one of the “dahlings” and never ever have my hands in dishwater.
          You know what? Even with the times we were looking at $9 in the bank and ten days to the end of the month — with a handful of flour and a mushroom in the fridge (And yes, $9 buys a lot of rice) — the path I chose was better. And totally worth it.

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          1. I married a fireman’s daughter. My mother never really came around to it. 35 years ago now. That said, I spent my life working for and around the big NY banks so I’m still “in the life”. I did cut myself off from academia, but that was all about my Da deciding it was time I grew up. Now I’m a just a traitor to my class and my sister bemoans how I squandered it all. I coulda been a contenda. At one point in my life I was what they call “MONEY”. I walked away from it all. No regrets at all.

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  7. The north american continent is still trying to recover from the last Ice Age, no, seriously. They have found that the area in the middle of the continent around the Great Lakes and on into Canada is rising after being crushed down by the weight of all that ice that has since melted. The planet is warming because we are coming out of an Ice Age. The planet has a wobble at the axis that takes 26,000 some odd years to complete. That more than anything we have done is affecting the weather/climate. When that cycle and the natural cycles of the sun coincide you get heating and cooling trends. 40,000 years ago their was ice sheets still retreating across the continent. Flooding of the coasts and low laying areas happened when all that ice melted. There have been multiple ice ages and multiple warm periods. If communists didn’t have lies to rely on they’d have nothing. As I said yesterday, I pity them.

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    1. The Great Lakes dropped level a while back, being, of course, blamed on Gorebal Wormening, and then one day, someone noticed the CN Tower top was several feet more above sea level than it had been some years before. Opps, real global warming was at fault, the lack of an ice sheet had finally allowed the crust to “pop like a soda can” back into shape, and after a few more years, water levels were actually too high in places, instead of “the new normal™” of several feet lower than tradition.

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    2. 80% of the last few million years has been Ice Ages. We are currently in the Holocene Interglacial Period, one of those brief warm intervals between Ice Ages. And, based on those millions of years of climate history, the Holocene is near its end. The next Ice Age is actually a bit overdue.

      But the Climate Hysterics are all panicking because it’s a few degrees warmer than the ‘pre-industrial norm’ which they take to mean the middle of the Little Ice Age. When the Thames and the Seine used to freeze over solid every winter. I’ve seen a painting from the 1700’s depicting a winter fair being held on the frozen Thames with booths, shacks, and horse-drawn wagons and sleighs on the ice. Compared to that, I’m fine with a little Glowbull Wormening.

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      1. Back in the mid to late 1800s the Tennessee River in northern Alabama froze hard enough that they cut ice blocks from it to store in insulated bunkers for use through the summer. These days not so much, thank the Lord for refrigeration.
        As for Global Warming, simple solution. Surface detonate a handful of “clean” nuclear devices and cool the Earth’s surface right down. See 1816, The Year Without A Summer, caused by the 1815 Tambora eruption for proof of concept.

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  8. Yep,
    A cow can wander around in a pasture eating grass for a couple years then be turned into a wonderful stack of steaks, and hamburgers and sausages and roasts and ribs and, well you get the idea, you can even still eat it after everything else you thought you could eat fails to grow to an edible size.
    But yea, lets get rid of cows,
    I say we should get rid of the idiots saying this, would be easier.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. And in the meantime, you might be able to get some milk from that cow (yes, I realize that milk cows and beef cows are not the same breeds).

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      1. Aunt & Uncle used to have 3 milk cows that were breed, so 3 calves, then they’d get one steer calf. That would be 4 calves that were put on the hardest to milk cow (she also despised feeding the calves that weren’t hers, so had to be watched closely). The other two were milked. More than enough milk for the family of 5 (or 6 for the summers I was there). Milk stored in outside refrigerator and neighbors would come by to get a glass gallon, or two, paying on the honor system. Milk that didn’t sell had the cream that rose to the top skimmed off, and aunt would make butter, part of which would also sell. Rest might be used for other household foods or given to the pigs being raised with their slops. The heifer milk calves were traded for steer calves. Various neighbors would then pay for their yearling or part. I think they kept one yearling for themselves (plus they had two deer, two elk, trout, and a hog). Hobby farm. They have 40 acres west of Baker. Also had 3 or 4 horses.

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    3. Heck, my backyard chickens ate weeds, fruit and veggie trimmings and peelings, bugs and bird seed … this in addition to the chicken feed from Tractor Supply …
      And in return, we received eggs… lovely fresh eggs!

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      1. Chickens are great at eating bugs. Grandma used to let the chickens run in the garden where they ate grasshoppers, caterpillars and potato bugs by the pound. At least, until the ripening vegetables started to look like food. Then it was “Chickens OUT of the garden!”

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    4. If you plan your pasturage right, you can grow cows, pigs, and chickens on the same land and rotate ’em, thus enriching the soil. Having more than one kind of animal, they eat one another’s pests, and if you plant fruit or nut trees and protect them until they reach maturity, you basically have your own little food-producing ecosystem. But that sounds like work, and TPTB don’t like self-sufficiency.
      And if you choose the right breeds of cattle and chickens, you can have eggs and milk as well as protein!
      . . . It’s not like I’ve been looking wistfully at the various acreages in our valley or anything.

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  9. I realized way-back-when that becoming a leftist meant that you could adorn yourself with the mantle of superiority without ever doing the hard work of study and learning. This is why they react with such fury if someone presents a different point of view. This might bring into question their own superiority and that simply cannot be allowed.

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    1. Yep. And by my time (I can’t remember if you’re older or younger!) it also brought perks and fast promotion, so middle wits could become “revered experts” by 35.

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        1. Actually it honestly took me years to figure out for them — because outsiders don’t know how gamed it is — it is “tenure” and “teaching sinecures” and “being invited to TV programs” and “Having lecture series on prestigious services”. They have almost no readers, so they need that to LIVE.
          It should have been quicker, because of how many agents tried to push me into that path: “Write a book every few years, get a job teaching college.”
          BUT the thing is, I write because I love writing. And I love reading fun stuff. And it never occurred to me anyone would do it JUST for credentials. So it took mea years.
          Sometimes I can be so stupid it borders on impaired.

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  10. Fundamental truth : Liberals believe that they are smarter and more moral than you, therefore it is their right to tell you how to live, and if you disagree you are either evil or stupid, or both, so they don’t have to talk to you. And since their superiority is their entire worldview, any disagreement is taken as a personal attack, demanding a stiff penalty.

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    1. They will never, ever, ever forgive me for existing. They KNOW minorities and women and people otherwise disadvantaged need quotas and help to make it in publishing.
      And yet, I, a foreign born woman that most of them, until they find my politics identify as “Latin” on sight, writing in my third language, with no contacts in the industry not only made in in, but was a finalist for the Mythopoeic before my background was even known.
      It took me a while to realize that it’s not just my having come out of the political closet: once they found out my background, and what I was doing, even while I was keeping my lips zipped, they HAD to sabotage me. If I made it big enough to count, their entire project would be refuted.
      BTW it wasn’t easy. Most people break in in 3 years and it took me 13. However, most of it was cultural adaptation and learning to speak the symbolic language, which is a thing of acculturating. The rest was infertility treatments, miscarriages, two kids, moving across the country — twice– and being too broke to submit. Also breaking in pre-internet where figuring out the process could be arcane.
      Not, you know “institutional discrimination” or whatever other phantoms.

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    1. I wonder how the invader/refugees are faring with all this global warming up north? Next week in many places it drops below freezing well below. Highs of -5.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Hell, I’m wondering how they’re handling it down here in TX. I can’t imagine the water systems in those govt tents are hardened for single digits.

        Liked by 1 person

  12. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/cricket-farm-london-ontario-1.6506606

    At full capacity the facility plans to put out 13 million kilos of cricket protein (about 6 million pounds) per year. That is .002% of the 40 billion pounds of beef (JUST beef) consumed by the US each year. It covers 12 acres. The information I am finding on resource use covers only the water and so on consumed by the insects themselves. Nothing about the facility or processing. (Same with vegetable protein. The resource use information is severely lacking. They cover only the water used for the crop itself.)

    Their market is pet food at the moment.

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    1. Um…13 million kilograms is almost 28.7 million pounds or 14,330 tons. So, 0.007% of 40 billion. Put another way, about 45,000 cows. Of course, this assumes that bug meal is as nutritious as beef.

      They will have to eat 30-40 million kilograms of bug feed (Made of what? Where? Transported how?) and generate 15-25 million kilograms of bug crap (Disposed of how?) along with a few million kilograms of chitin which the bugs shed when they grow and molt.

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      1. See my comment above. Cricket is about 1/2 the Kcal of meh hamburger. It takes about 470Kg of cricket to feed an adult male for about a year so thats food for about 28,000 adult males for a year (assuming only cricket protein). Reduce to 1/4 cricket protein (feeding other food stocks to your humans, beans, rice, etc) that will feed ~112,000 people a year or about the population of Lowell Massachusetts (as if living in Lowell weren’t punishment enough).

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          1. Better yet, let’s scale it up and use Sodom on the Potomac. And make it mandatory for all living/”working” there. Especially if any government building is involved. :twisted:

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    3. Can’t do the majority of ‘vegetable protein’ foods, since they are made with soy and I’m allergic.

      From my (vague) recollection of a report on the bug protein idea, it was wildly less efficient than cows, costlier, and worse for the environment.

      It was like when they wanted to use algae farms for … something or other back in the day. It turned out that it used more of whatever resource it was supposed to replace than if they’d just used the original resource.

      This, sadly, is Progressivism today. Create a problem to solve and make it worse so you can justify staying in power or grabbing more in the name of ‘solving’ the situation you created.

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      1. Well, part of it is that they want to be proven right when they were young and yelling at their classmates.
        They’re still stupid, but now they have power, and stopping you eating beef will prove their young self was right. Nothing else matters.
        (Also their brain has probably atrophied more than usual for their age, due to veganism.)

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      2. …the way making alcohol for fuel uses more oil than the gasoline it ‘saves’.

        At least the way the giant government-subsidized alcohol-fuel corporations do it here. In Brazil, they make alcohol fuel from sugar cane, using alcohol-fueled tractors and trucks, heating the stills with steam generated by burning sugar cane residue, and spreading the ash as fertilizer. That process actually manages to be energy-positive.

        If the government has to subsidize something, it’s because it’s not practical. If it was practical, people would already be making money at it.
        ———————————
        If a business tries something and it doesn’t work, they either stop doing it or they will go broke. If the government tries something that doesn’t work, they just keep shoveling our money into it forever.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. WE use corn because Iowa and Politicians wooing the farm vote, and as we tend to tariff imports of sugar, our cane gets made into sugar, even though HFCS is now also subsidized into use, but prices are kept to make sugar the best dollar for cane. Brazil has a better environment for Raising Cane (sorry) to begin with. Petrobas, the Brazilian gas and oil company, by the way is owned by the Gov’t of Brazil

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        2. Personal hobbyhorse warning: (family raises corn and is part of an ethanol co-op).

          Corn ethanol is energy positive, although less so than the sugar cane derivatives.
          Energy positive is not the only necessity for a viable market, though. The federal Renewable Fuel Standard vastly expanded what would otherwise be a niche product. Some interesting history dependencies there – everything that JP Kalishek wrote and more.

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      3. Cricket flour can trigger shellfish allergies, apparently. It’s not a good idea to render all dishes that contain flour a potential allergen.

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        2. Yeah. I know someone who tested positive for an allergy to cockroaches (they ran the wrong allergen test on her, it was supposed to be plants), so she shouldn’t eat that either.

          On that note, I know at least two unrelated people who are allergic to yeast.

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    4. For starters, they probably think Americans eat to much meat (we eat more than people in other countries do). So assuming they’ve done any calculations, it won’t be based off of American consumption numbers.

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      1. And the true believers would take the allergen factor as a feature, not a bug. (Pun unintended, but “I’m an engineer, not an author!”)

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      2. A friend of mine is violently allergic to everything they make alternative proteins out of (as well as corn, eggs, shellfish, etc.). She HAS to have real meat, or she’ll have an anaphylactic reaction.

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          1. As mentioned before, they do not consider this a flaw. It’s a feature.

            I really think that deep down most of our liberals are Eugenicists / Practical Darwinists.

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  14. the person coming up with this theory had never, ever, not even in semi-lucid imaginings been near an agricultural region or had any idea how one grew food or cattle.

    Rather obviously ( I should know…) I grew up at least “SORT OF” rural… though VERY MUCH NOT “on the farm”… in fact, Ma made a point of saying that I could go into ANY field I desired, so long as I STAYED OFF THE FARM. And, mind, she WAS the “Farmer’s Daughter” (Pa was one mighty lucky fellow…) So, despite every downturn and weirdturn and goofiness the Universe has thrown my way…. despite it ALL… I ain’t on the farm. And THAT, is – no matter how humble things might seem – SUCCESS.

    Mind, I’d LOVE to be a bit MORE rural (with goo network connectivity) and have neighbors with horses….. I like horses… but I know they are best off being cared for by others. A Mino needs to know his limitations, and all that.

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    1. If wishes were horses, I’d have a few myself. Too bad I did not know about mini-horses (not pony, not bred down to size on purpose) until now. Might have foregone my first dog and gotten one of them instead. Not that I could really afford the dog (she was free, but everything that comes with dog ownership isn’t), let alone the cost and care of a mini-horse. We talked about horses but real life meant either not enough time, or not enough money, and horse care is not inexpensive.

      Liked by 1 person

  16. Hey. Everybody knows that Volkswagens float.

    I like to blame Frank Loyd Wright for a lot of this urban/rural stupidity, he was one of the first to say if we stacked all the agricultural workers in nicely designed dorms and apartment buildings that So Much Land Would Be Freed Up. Which is true, and given the automobile there’s no reason not to stack the proles. Nobody walks to the farm, right? You drive.

    Well, unless there’s a weather thing. Or a fire. In which case nobody is there, on the farm, and the animals are all lost to whatever it was. Because Franky baby didn’t understand that a farm is NOT A WAREHOUSE FULL OF BRICKS.

    I could go further back and blame Herbert Spencer. Whose primary sin was to think that he could ‘intellect’ his way to victory with a grand unified theory of social progress, that being in his case Social Darwinism.

    Or we could blame the Frenchies, like the never-sufficiently-damned JJ Rousseau and their -idiotic- notions.

    But why stop there, when you can go alllll the way back to the Classical Smartasses, Plato and Aristotle. Who both thought that “intellect your way to victory!!!” was The Way and that learning by example and experience was for losers.

    Recalling at this point that the accumulated lessons of example and experience are called “tradition”. Of course sometimes things which are stupid creep into tradition as well, usually ideas of intellectuals.

    It took Galileo famously dropping two rocks of different size off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove that Aristotle’s contention about the bigger one falling faster was wrong. I expect anyone who said “Well let’s find out!” immediately discovered that Aristotle was wrong about a lot of things, but history records Leonardo as being The Guy who made the Normies of Europe believe it.

    Plato of course was also wrong, and his “Philosopher King” foolishness has been a lot more pernicious over the years. Easy for me to say, maybe, but history is mean that way.

    Currently we are treated to “you will eat bugs, own nothing, and be happy” by the same pointed heads as Plato, Aristotle, JJ Rousseau, Herbie Spencer and Frankie Wright. My favorite example lately is the car-sharing guy.

    https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2019/12/another-stupid-smart-person-tries-to.html

    Money quote: “Most of the time, the equipment will sit unused, occupying prime real estate and driving up housing costs.”

    Yes, that was Dan Amman, CEO of Cruise the self-driving-car division of General Motors, telling us all that we suck for DARING to own equipment (aka a car) that is not IN USE 24/7/365. How dare you proles tie up valuable resources and prime real estate (your driveway) by having a vehicle for your own use?! You must make that vehicle a Community Resource, so that the vehicle can be used Efficiently!

    Because Efficiency!!! is smarter than duplication, right? Right?!!! Hell yeah, one car can serve five families instead of having five cars for five families. Or in my case, three cars for one family. (I like cars.)

    Which is fine, theoretically, in a high-trust society. Because in a proper high trust society, people will clean up after themselves before sending the shared car off to the next user. Or, probably in the back of Mr. Amman’s mind, there could be a tidy profit to be made off fines for not cleaning puke off the back seat when you send the share car off after it takes your drunk @$$ home from the bar. Commies love coercion in a Good Cause, right?

    Ignoring the fact that if the share car arrives to take you to work and there’s puke on the seats, or it doesn’t arrive at all due to not enough cars for too many riders, you are not going to work. Or gee, what if -anything- out of the ordinary happens and a lot of people want to use a car at the same time? Just a ball game or a concert could do that. All the cars are hired for the ball game, so they are all at the stadium, and therefore there are none to take you to Grandma’s house. Too bad so sad, little prole.

    Oh, but wait! Dan Amman says that of course you would plan for that, and have excess capacity on hand in case there might be a ball game. In which case, all the extra cars will be sitting around unused, occupying prime real estate and driving up housing costs. Right? But it’ll be okay, because it was planned for! A big brain sat down and optimized it, the decision wasn’t left to a stupid prole with nothing on his mind but his own convenience.

    [incoherent roaring ensues.]

    Okay, I’ll stop now. This is getting to be a wall of text, you get the picture.

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    1. “How dare you proles tie up valuable resources and prime real estate (your driveway) by having a vehicle for your own use?! You must make that vehicle a Community Resource, so that the vehicle can be used Efficiently!”

      Wonder how many cars he owns?

      Liked by 1 person

    4. Central Planning A) never works, simply because planners cannot possibly know enough, and B) creates black markets, because markets always grow into the cracks and gaps to meet needs, even if illegal.

      Liked by 1 person

    5. Um… You do know, I hope, that Galileo never actually did that experiment with the falling weights? And that Aristotle was all in favour of observation and experience, and criticized Plato because he was the one who wasn’t?

      Aristotle gets blamed for a lot of things that he never said or did.

      Liked by 1 person

    6. pssssssssst

      Do you know how the Nazis “ran the trains on time”, and “were so efficient”?

      They skipped stuff like regular maintenance and wear rates and just ran the trains into the ground. The only reason this didn’t become an obvious problem is because right about when the bill was about to come due the bombers were busy laying waste to everything they could reach.

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  17. The Great Flood of 1862 in California, where continuous rain for 43 days starting in December 1861 eventually dumping 10 feet of liquid on the state, capped off in January 1862 with a major atmospheric river storm warm enough to melt any snow that had accumulated in the Sierra Nevada mountains, flooding California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long by 60 wide, oddly occurred well before SUVs, or even coal fired power plants, were invented.

    —
    Side note: One of the first “oh noes” in the Wikipedia (Hah!) entry is “The governor, state legislature, and state employees were not paid for a year and a half.”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The Confederate expedition to take California away from the Union was quite sure that they got within a few miles of the Pacific. (They were actually stopped at the Battle of Picacho Pass – about 50 miles north-northwest of my house in Tucson…)

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          1. I used google maps to get as straight of a shot west it would give me, which was San Diego, via roads. Which naturally the CWC wasn’t limited to. They’d still be limited to the passes. Getting horses over them mountain trails, not passes, isn’t trivial for those experienced with the area, which these troops couldn’t have been (not if they thought they were closer to the Pacific than they were). Guessing they were headed either for San Francisco or Sacramento, latter which isn’t even on the Pacific.

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            1. Their scouts (yes, not familiar with the territory, although few but the locals really were) thought they were at the Pacific because they saw a vast expanse of water that stretched beyond sight.

              Arizona also flooded out that year (1862) – even beyond the floodplains of the Gila and Salt Rivers. (Happened in the 1970s, too – but we had the dams that mitigated it quite a bit, so not as bad. Still washed out most of the bridges in Phoenix and Tucson, and one of my sisters had to be evacuated by National Guard helicopter; her house at the time was on the wrong side of the Gila from Safford.)

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      2. I just read the article on that battle.

        I mean, cavalry officers are supposed to be aggressive, but “I’ll just skip over the orders my CO just gave me and charge my guys in single file through the mesquite mounted up so we’re really great targets for the dismounted Confederates!” is pretty much full on dumb. I bet he sounded a charge first too.

        Yeesh.

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    3. They’ve written up a worst-case scenario study based on the 1862 weather pattern, and some wag created an acronym so it could be called the ARkStorm.

      Note that a few years back, we had an atmospheric river storm (I refer to it as “the monsoon”) that had record-setting 24hr water drops, the sort of thing that would have led to an ARkStorm scenario if it had come at the end of a thoroughly wet season like last winter, instead of the years of drought it actually came after.

      I was camping in it. We estimate about 10 inches in 24hrs where I was, and it’s an estimate because the nearest weather station has huge recording gaps in its information. Anyway, my tent stayed dry, but I sure didn’t get any sleep for the noise.

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  18. Peeking inside the head of one of the billionaire climate crusaders, one might find: “I’m not a bad person – I know it. Sure, I did all those things with that Epstein fellow, but I know I’m not evil. I’m rich too, which means I’m better than everyone else. I’ll show them – I’ll use my superior intellect combined with my money to save the entire planet! Those female human units who made fun of me in high school and college will finally appreciate me then!”

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    1. They will like your money, and still dress up all in lace and go in style to the cheap side of town to get with their good looking jock boyfriend. Because when all is said and done you are still a disgusting little twerp, only now with money.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Actually on further consideration, rather than climate crusader, I think climate conquistador is closer, though the climatista’s dirt goddess cult is more along the lines of the bloody-pyramid Aztecs than the Conquistador’s Christianity.

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        1. Neo-Druids on the way to become actual Nazis.

          Although yours flows better.

          And for the Neo-Druids in question it’s close enough.

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  20. They live in a world of floating abstractions, and nobody has ever (like, ever) told them that abstractions are abstracted from reality. Reality is a hurty thing that doesn’t always agree with them, so it’s much better to believe in the beautiful abstraction, and hammer away at reality until it conforms to the ideal.

    And since their abstractions are unconnected to anything real, when you tell them how that has always led to mass graves in the past (Mao, for instance), they cheerfully brush it off, because they have great ideas, the best ideas, and are also later in time than those disasters, and therefore better and guaranteed never to be wrong.

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    1. So am I. And I remember all the science fiction confidently predicting this. It reads…. strangely. By now I’m supposed to be typing this from under an iceberg, I THINK.
      As with global warming, even if their predictions were utterly true, they make three huge mistakes:
      1- blaming humans. Considering how much Earth’s climate changed over the millenia, before any humans EXISTED this seems… odd?
      2- assuming a trend of a decade or so will go on forever.
      3- assuming an acceleration such that the trend reaches fruition in less than twenty years. (I think this is the drive to tell people “I was right”. That’s all.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. They Really Like the idea of original sin, but without that annoying redemption stuff. Helps them keep the plebes in line.
        But a decade is, like, a Really Long Time and stuff.
        If they assume the acceleration, they get to whip up hysteria and be all virtuous and stuff. One of Clive Cussler’s novels gave the template, rather explicitly. “Here’s an environmental problem. We have 52 weeks to fix it. You won’t even notice that it is a problem until week 51, and by then it’s too late and all life on Earth is doomed.” So, even if you think the prediction is wrong, you have to take it seriously, because waiting to see what happens will kill everything. Exactly the kind of argument leftists and stupid people like — assume they’re right, and ignore reality because reasons.

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          1. WPDE nukes any number-and-a-dot at the beginning of a line.

            Use the HTML entity for period: .

            So, to get:

            1. A numbered line

            Use:

            2. The next numbered line

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                  1. Of course; the MS template. But the software isn’t idiotic; it’s the ones who write it hwo are. See 90% of the commercial websites for further examples.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. My work computer lost its ad blockers last month. ZOMG, how is clickbait still a thing? I’ve been murderous over all the flashy blinky shit I now have to endure just to read the news. (No soundcard on the comp, thank whatever gods there are.)

                      And every single last person who thinks autoplay is a good idea for website ads needs to be tarred, feathered, and then impaled on pikes as a warning to the next ten generations of marketing idiots that treating individuals as manipulable slaves is the opposite of wise.

                      Liked by 1 person

      2. there is also the “It’s never happened in MY lifetime!” sorts.
        err, yeah, that’s why they get called Century occurrences. They only happen, on average, once a century (the quote was tossed at me by a NYC resident when I said the storm and flooding was not at all unprecedented on a Wattupwiththat post on “Superstorm” Sandy, though Manhattan Island had flooding in 1950/51(?) once, too so, AVERAGE might mean more than once a century, but the knob was born in ’58)

        Liked by 1 person

    2. The Old Farmer’s Almanac published a couple of, “hmm,” articles a while back. One pointed out that the “media,” oscillates between, “We’re all gonna freeze!” and, “We’re all gonna roast!” on about a 75 year cycle. All the way back to the 19th century.

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    3. So am I.

      Am glad that changes in environmental have cleaned the air and rivers, at least in US, and Canada. Fully aware that animals, etc., on the sensitive and endangered lists go on the list and rarely come off. There is a reason for that. Most of them that could come off the list will be endangered soon enough, again. Often only recovered in part of their former range.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Like the engineering dream team with the pedestrian bridge collapse in Miami. No oversigtht, same composition, no engineering apprenticeship and no OWGs to mentor them. Not that they would have listened.

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        1. AVE on U-Tube did a breakdown on that. Design was actually fairly sound for the finished structure, but during construction it required more supports that the city refused to allow them to use as it would have blocked a lane of traffic.

          Gov’t at its best.

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          1. Yeah, the bridge has been discussed here before. And while there may have been some diversity reasons why it was awarded, that apparently wasn’t the reason why it failed. Also, everything I’ve heard suggests that the diversity aspect on that job was merely, “Let the female engineer have this particular job.”

            The entire team in that Twitter video is female. There isn’t a single man on a team with over a dozen people on it. Given what the engineering field looks like in general, that’s active misandry. If that’s the company’s engineering staff (and not just showing off the part of the company’s engineering team that happens to be women), then that is actively recruiting women only, and circle-filing the resume of every single qualified male that applies.

            Further, engineers being what they are, I suspect that the more competent female engineers go to companies that don’t exclusively draw from the female talent pool. Which means that the engineers that this company gets…

            And finally, I’m reminded of the article that ran in a (British, iirc) newspaper quite a while back, written by a woman who had decided to start her own all-female company in a media-related field (I can’t recall exactly which one). And the utter and complete mess that it turned out to be.

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  23. Probably related –

    Ace has a piece up today about a new type of organization that is devoted to taking management of land… and keeping it fallow.

    Further, the organization wants to be listed in the NYSE, and the NYSE is petitioning to the SEC for new rules that allow a company to release shareholder reports based on how much the company reduced emissions by, instead of profits.

    Apparently the organization is angling to be granted charge of Federal lands in order to make them fallow.

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    1. So their P&L is based not on how much money they make, but on how much they prevent other people from making.

      How perfectly Progressive of them.
      ———————————
      ‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.

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      1. I’m actually not overly concerned about that in the long run. Industry titans fall all the time. And an investment company that starts explicitly taking actions that are anathema to profitability will fall before long. I wouldn’t be surprised if Black Rock is a pale shadow of its former self ten years from now.

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          1. Some companies did get dismembered, though.

            Additionally, the companies that collapsed in 2008, as well as the ones that were bailed out, didn’t have much in the way of assets that they could sell off to generate immediate cash. But if a company is investing in real estate, that’s not the case.

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              1. And they are still bound by economics.

                Everyone is bound by economics. No matter how much song and dance they make to convince people that they are not.

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                  1. Scorched earth on the real estate market? I’m not exactly sure what that would entail. But other than a mass sell-off of it’s residential properties – which would be a good thing for new home buyers (although it would probably drive home prices down for existing owners) – I can’t think of what else Black Rock could really do.

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                    1. junior, I think we’re all fixated on “Black Rock”.

                      The plan seems to be to have a new “non-profit”, operating according to the same ESG principles, and with a lot of the same backers. As a “non-profit”, it can define its’ “fiduciary duties” differently, and close down that line of attack.

                      And at that point, it will simply buy homes, farms, mineral rights, commodities, and sit on them, removing them from the “supply” side. That prices the entry level even further out of reach, and probably sets up a generational conflict with those who are “profiting” by having their asset values go up.

                      Now throw in the idea of taxing “unrealized income”…..

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                    2. It doesn’t matter whether or not you need to show a profit. You can’t buy stuff without money. Period. End of story. A company can accept a large number of donations as the initial seed fund, and start buying up large amounts of real estate. But eventually the money is going to run out unless the company figures out a way to generate some sort of income. That goes double as real estate prices start to rise because someone (namely them) is buying up all of the real estate and taking it off of the market.

                      If it were easy, some of the already filthy rich individuals backing the WEF would have done it on their own, and wouldn’t need intermediary organizations to do it for them. Black Rock worked in the short term because Black Rock’s money largely comes from investors who aren’t caught up in the cultural and/or WEF nonsense. Creating a non-profit that exclusively takes real estate off the market requires income through donations specifically for that purpose, and that’s not as readily available.

                      Yes, Bill Gates owns a lot of farmland (fun fact – go to DuckDuckGo and type “How much farmland”, and it autocompletes to “How much farmland does Bill Gates own” :P). But he only owns a little over a quarter of a million acres. There are roughly 900 million acres of farmland in the US. He’s apparently the single biggest owner of farmland in the US. But the chunk that he owns is all but non-existent when compared with the entirety.

                      Never mind what happens when a local government decides to eminent domain (think Reverse-Kelo :P ) some of the non-profit-owned fallow land for a housing developer…

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                    3. OK, so, do you really think that Black Rock does not have close ties with government bureaucrats? Do you really think that they only invest in real estate? Do you think that, if those in power at Black Rock were in collusion, they could not engineer a financial meltdown nationwide, let alone world wide?

                      Maybe they buy up residential properties, then get regulations passed that make it illegal to sell the properties to individual owners. Institutions only. And that’s only restricting the scorched earth policy to residential real estate.

                      Black Rock is invested in basically everything. And the head of Black Rock (or one of its heads) openly bragged about forcing compliance. So, I’m sorry, but you are being entirely too restrictive in your interpretation of what I said. Think like a sociopath. Look at what they have, and ask how many, many, many ways they could fuck things up for as many people as possible, no matter how irrational it seems.

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                    4. Do you even think about what you’re saying beyond “Black Rock! Black Rock! Black Rock!”?

                      1.) If a law were to be passed that real estate could only be sold to institutions, then the problem wouldn’t be with Black Rock. The problem would be with the law.

                      2.) Black Rock is hardly the first company that’s been very cozy with the government. History is littered with the corpses of companies that thought that their close relationship with the government would save them.

                      3.) Lots of companies have invested in “everything” in the past. What inevitably happens is that thinking changes, and for whatever reason the company decides to narrow its focus. The parts that aren’t included in that focus get shed.
                      Disney’s doing that right now (or trying to). 3M (which is also quite literally involved in just about every sort of product) is shedding all of its subsidiaries that are involved in medical stuff (if it hasn’t done so already). Conversely, companies that are heavily focused on one thing start to think about expanding into related fields. It’s a constant cycle of expansion followed by contraction, followed by expansion, for any company of appreciable size.

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                    5. PSC was like that. I have no idea what the original product or service was. By the time Percon, who I worked for, got bought, or quickly afterwards, it really consisted of just Spectra Physics (self check out flatbed scanners and screens), and Percon (handheld scanners and data inventory handheld computers). PSC over extended buying both. Quickly shed whatever they were doing before. Not fast enough. Eventually shed down to just core engineering (except any application software) and the core engineering ended up getting picked up by DataLogic. Eventually shelved software InteTrak (warehouse inventory tracking) rights and code, reverted back to the original owner (who had partnered with Percon owners) and the engineering department head at Percon who hired me, to recreate Percon name, in 2010. They started by using the original inventory computer Falcon line now being created by Datalogic. But have evolved into building their own specialized inventory computer lines. I did consider looking them up, but by 2012 (when I learned of it) a new 2 year (sure the software had had a track record, but it had been shelved for 8 years before restartup) startup VS staying with a 25 year old company I’d now been with for 8 years? Plus Percon (and PSC) was the source of unreasonable schedules and my deadline nightmares ;-) Decided not to (other programmer and computer specialists, or anyone married to them, will understand).

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          2. Blackrock is already backing away from ESG as a financial disaster and has been for a while.

            Everything is fun and games until the reces-, er, I mean the summer of recovery hits.

            Liked by 2 people

    3. It’s ANY natural resource: farming, mining, drilling, fishing, any of them. Take them out of production and keep them that way.

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      1. The focus is apparently on government land, probably because they don’t actually need to buy the land. They just need to be granted “stewardship” of it.

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  25. And this is why they want to totally own the publishing world. Because their people believe the fictions. They assume if they can stop any alternative, we all will. I hope they can’t, and it is harder, but some of us are too darn contrarian to ever be taken in.

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    2. We’ve taken care of everything
      The words you read, the songs you sing
      The pictures that give pleasure to your eye
      It’s one for all and all for one
      We work together, common sons
      Never need to wonder how or why
      — Rush, “2112”

      Liked by 1 person

    3. I assume they’re lying with every tooth in their mouths first. If what they say turns out to be right, I reluctantly admit it. But most of the time it’s nonsense.

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    2. Reminds me of another joke:

      An economist, a chemist, and an engineer were stranded on a desert island. And between them they had only a single can of beans, but no can opener. The engineer suggested that he climb a palm tree to a precise height, then throw the beans a precise distance at a precise angle. “And when the can hits,” he said, “it will split open.” “No,” said the chemist. “We’ll leave the can in the sun until the heat causes the beans to expand so much the can will explode.” “Nonsense,” said the economist. “Using either method we’d lose too many beans. According to my plan, there will be no mess or fuss and not a single bean will be lost.” Tthe engineer and the chemist said, “We’re certainly willing to consider it. What’s your plan?” And the economist answered, “First assume we have a can opener…”

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  27. What I wanted to work was the books where…

    Oh, maybe we were off the planet a bit more? Not mass migration, but enough dispersal that hopefully the worst of the idiots between here and Mars died in hard vacuum because they were too stupid to put a suit on. And we were there to stay for the long haul.

    Or the books where we had made it past our teething troubles as a species and were able to handle the Bigger Problems of the universe.

    Or even the ones where “it’s been a massive crock of shit before…but we now have all of that lovely fertilizer to grow the next generation!” sorts of disasters.

    And while I was a suburban kid, I knew that the end process of that meat was the supermarket, not that it just mysteriously appeared there. That pigs would eat anything that they could swallow. That cows lived mostly on waste crop products in most situations. That geese are mean and making them into fois gras is much better than they deserve.

    But we have far too many people that believe in fetishes. In magical thinking. In that they don’t want to know how the sausage is made-and will attack anyone that tries to break through their lovely denial.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. In what way is maintenance of the common areas not “giving to the community”? Yeah, I know what the DemRat intends (welfare for the county and/or state, stolen from others as usual), but what it says, at least as described, id a large part of what HOAs do.

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  29. Average leftoid take – “Oil is bad, so we should use ethanol in gas to help lessen use of oil!” – ignoring it takes more oil to grow the crop that should be food, which of course raises food prices (adding the take, “But they can make alcohol with non-food stuff!” – ignoring that A: the law was started by those trying to find ways to make corn farmers more money, so they’ll vote for them and B: making it with other than food stuff is far far more expensive and yes, would take even more arable land) then the energy to turn it into a pure alcohol, and , and , and. I could rant for very long periods but shall refrain.

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        1. Yea, we save soooo much water with our new GE washer. Snort. Lets see. Setting for clothing, where (technically) the different cycles adjust for amount of clothing put in, plus, forced extra deep rinse, plus extra final rinse. So far that is the worst we’ve had to do except on bulk loads. Bulk loads can require an extra rinse and spin cycle after above settings are done. Dryer don’t make adjustments, but dryer works on sensor detecting wet clothing. Have had to run dryer extra if vent filter gets super full (cat hair on blankets does that), but that isn’t because of new dryer specifications.

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          1. My now near 20 year old Wirlpool el-cheapos do okay cleaning (detergent mandated changes and hard water do make it a challenge) and electric dryer had the sensor but it stopped years ago, and it has a failsafe of “more dry” setting just past the sensor setting that just turns it into a timed dry.

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            1. We are 3+ years into our 4th set. First set lasted 17 years. Second two sets lasted 12+ years each. (Grabs calculator to be sure running math correctly). First 3 sets were Kenmore (Whirlpool, without the name). Current set is GE because last set died after Sears disappeared. Same models that the appliance and the home improvement had, but Costco had them for slightly less (plus removal of old ones, and full installation, a $200 savings there). Plus 3 years warranty without buying an extended warranty for the extra 2 years.

              We’ve never get as cheap as we can, but we aren’t getting all the bells and whistles, or even mid-level. Only changes we made this time is: Electronic display, but not settings, and no agitator in the drum. Latter I love. I hate that the lid locks down and I have to pause the wash to be able to open the lid. Irritating delay if adding one more thing or out of balance that requires intervention.

              We also get sets. When one starts to fail the other isn’t far behind. So far failures have been either “can’t get a part at any price” or “repair costs as much as a replacement”. Usually we took the old set to the appliance recycle, who cobbled working machines out of busted ones for low income. But with the delivery taking the last set, don’t know where they went. Even county landfill breaks apart and recycles appliances, but they don’t make working machines out of the working parts.

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              1. I had to go with cheapest I could get as my funds were dwindling fast at the time (just moved from Louisiana to Texas) and was in a rush to get myself sorted. Thinking of it now, these are Roper (with “By Whirlpool” under the name) and I really was hoping i’d have them last long enough replacements would be less of a financial hit (HA! I nearly went bankrupt and still have no credit score from the changes in my spending. Bought my house outright for “cash”. I loan myself money from my 401k when needed) but yeah, come April I will have had the pair for 20 years.
                egad

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      2. Oh, and yeah, I’m sure my dishwasher, that does poorly on it’s lowest setting of 1 hour wash, isn’t using a whole lot less power than a commercial one that down a load in 1-3 minutes ( it has to keep the water hot the whole time, and the other cycles are hours long). Yeah, sure, the thing will hold less of the items, but it is still 9 minutes max run (if you had to do dishes, then glasses and silver, then pots/pans) and everything is actually sanitized, not just water splashed on it.
        I ‘d love to have the old washer my Uncle had gotten out of a renovation. I forget which brand, but it was a top of the line for the time, a bit noisy, but better than the newer GE they went to that was nearly silent, because my aunt had some bug about GE being best, and it matched the kitchen renovation they were doing (also gotten for free from a renovation he did “Just trow that out!”) Granted, the GE is still better than what they force on you today.

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      3. American Standard makes low-flow toilets you only need to flush once (or twice depending on how well your drain pipes handle low-flow waste – not much the toilet can do about inadequate slope in the pipes). Big Box store brands are cheaper but don’t work as well.

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      4. They were told there’d be no matter so they can’t add the two cycles or five flushes and realize more resources are being used in the long run.

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  30. Bad at World Building? Shee-it, half the writers in Hollywood don’t even understand their own world. Otherwise, why have an action move where an empty semi-automatic pistol goes click-click-click without having the slide drawn back? In fact, why do so few of these pistols, when they do go empty, not have the slide locked back? Did I miss something? Are my pistols SPECIAL?

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  31. As an obnoxious twenty-something back in the 70’s I was over at the house of a committed vegetarian (much to her children’s lament), and I saw the book, “Eat Low on the Food Chain.”
    I asked her what it meant by that.
    “Well, if you eat beef, cattle eat plants, so you should eat plants.”
    “I see, and plants eat shit, so….”
    Or maybe I said manure, but I’m sure it didn’t dent her certainty.

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  32. But they also believe these things, because it’s part of how their minds work. Even the ones “at the top”, even the ones in on concocting the lie end up buying it,

    As Elrond Hubbard taught us, the greatest danger of creating a religion is believing your own bullshit.

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  33. I’m still trying to figure out how to disabuse folks of these absurd notions. They put no stock in logic, so logic doesn’t persuade them. I’ve even tried talking about things they can see with their own eyes, and that doesn’t persuade them.

    Like sea level rise. I live in San Diego. For the last 20 years or longer, I drove over a bridge on Mission Bay on my daily commute. There’s an artificial island in the bay, built to contain a radio tower for the airport. That island is 3 feet above sea level. It’s been 3 feet above sea level for all that time. This is a bay, connected to the Pacific Ocean folks, and there ain’t been no sea level rise for at least 20 years. Actually much longer because it was built in the 50’s, but I only observed it with my own eyes for 20 years straight.

    Logic and actual observation won’t dissuade these folks. I’m unfortunately convinced of the truth of something David Horowitz once said, “I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill.” Maybe the only way left to persuade them is to change their desire?

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  34. You’re forgetting an important part of the equation. It will be easier for Lefties to control how the peasants think, travel, work, and eat (mealworm rations determined by social credit) because the population will be drastically reduced. How exactly that will happen is unclear, but I’m sure Kerry, Gates, etc. have some ideas for getting the numbers down.

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      1. But their likelihood of killing us AND them, say by engineering a COVID variant that targets the brain and appears to have a mortality rate of 100%, is pretty good. And they only have to screw up ONCE.

        https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/17/the-chinese-have-cooked-up-another-covid-strain-thats-beyond-irresponsible-n2633738

        “The study involved a “cousin” strain of the coronavirus, which was mutated and then administered to humanized mice; all died within eight days. The study does not say how this could impact humans, but the research has been heavily criticized as pointless, dangerous, and veering into absolute madness (via NY Post):”

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        1. What we have going for us is that the Chinese REALLY aren’t competent at this. That’s why the first attempt was such a flop. Partly what they’re trying to do is straight up impossible. Viruses that virulent that fast die out before infecting more than a few people. Or mutate super-fast.
          And the US is hard to infect. We’re CLEAN and sanitary beyond the imaginings of the rest of the world.
          Is it a 100% guaranteed we’re safe? Nothing is 100% guaranteed. But I will comfortably stake at 95% that this is not a thing. It is however a “clever” attempt to scare us, which is predictably working with the “China so stronk” people. This and the discussions of disease X are an attempt to restart the panic.
          Don’t help the panic. This is a not peer reviewed paper and Chinese “science” translates as “LOL”

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    1. I forwarded her that as soon as it hit my inbox, along with my comment:

      Well, you made Don Surber’s column. Unfortunately, I have to agree with his conclusion, even if I’m not 70:

      “I’m 70. I don’t have another 70 years to wait for this BS to end. Republicans in Washington are just imposters.
      F-word, F-word, F-word.”

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        1. The problem is half of us are ready to use boxes other than the ballot box while the other half, including people who openly say the ballot box is rigged, urge us to keep using the ballot box or the Left will make us look bad.

          As some point either you fight or own that you’re surrendering. Are we at that point? Don’t know, but if not I am now confident that at 57, barring accidents I’ll live to see it.

          Oddly, that is why I barely read much news but have put a lot of effort and money honestly don’t have into shelters for strays at the new house (as well as feeding them and hoping two that are friendly and clearly not feral will decide inside is better than outside).

          I can’t control if we are at the fish or cut bait point and I can’t control if enough people will want to fish to make it possible.

          Hell, I can’t get the cats to use the shelters I put out (and haven’t seen my favorite, the Siamese all day so I’m worried), but I can make them available and feed people when then come over.

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          1. Same. I’m 67, hubby is 72 (next month). Hubby’s brother is 77, his wife is 70. We aren’t going to be in the middle of anything. Baring wrong place. Even then best we can hope for is a large honor guard until they get diverted to the hot place and we join our angels at the Rainbow Bridge for our escort.

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      2. But it’s not the same thing. The Republicans in Washington and you for that matter and Don are all victims of the same blue thought.
        this is a change in tech and the change in thought and ways of living is coming along with it. It’s not going to be solved by a grand action from the top down.

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            1. The utopia they claim to want would have long since seen them shunted into a 1 room pensioners apartment as an unproductive member of society, if it didn’t see them dead.

              The reality of the utopia they actually would have gotten is far more grim.

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              1. In that respect I’d happily give them their utopia.

                And given how much more frequently I see helicopter memes (a trend which disturbs me in some ways) I’m neither alone or all that nasty about it.

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            2. I agree. In general. There are some stuff that has to be rolled back. Or at least adhered to (follow the dang laws!) But a lot of the stuff that has to be rolled back are regulations enforced by agencies. Trump had the right idea with “new regulation? Eliminate 100 others first.” Not quite strong enough. “Thinking about a new regulation? Eliminate 100 first. Then we’ll have a drag out discussion about why the one new regulation is needed.”

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        2. The trillions of dollars of infrastructure that supports our society was developed and refined incrementally over the course of 150 years. It can’t all be scrapped and replaced overnight by government decree.

          No matter what the Idiots In Charge believe.

          If Alternative Energy was practical, it wouldn’t be Alternative. People would already be using it and making money on it. The government is just subsidizing failure and mandating stupidity.
          ———————————
          Government can’t turn failure into success, but it sure can turn success into failure.

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          1. It can, however, be neglected and left unmaintained and collapse if not overnight quickly enough.

            There is a lot of ruin in a nation, yes, but 30 years ago there was a lot of ruination in California. Enough that it still elected fairly centrist Republicans (ie, not celebrities but actual pols) to statewide office.

            How much ruin in left in California? What’s being done to prevent locusts from California from going elsewhere to feed? We let them have Colorado already and Arizona may go soon.

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        3. Oh, forgot to mention that our existing infrastructure was mostly refined by regular people individually deciding what they wanted to buy, or not buy. ‘Top-down’ decision making was based on providing what people were willing to pay for.

          Now it’s based on what the elitists want FOR us, be it impractical electric cars, fields of giant pinwheels or bug parts in place of beef. I strongly suspect that grasshopper drumsticks taste not at all like chicken.
          ———————————
          VOTE FOR CTHULHU
          — We’ve had it with all these lesser evils.

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        4. No, but top down action can destroy things before the change can stop them.

          See your comment above out “efficient” washing machines and low flow toilets. We didn’t get them or no phosphate dishwashing detergent or a dozen other things because of changes in tech or thought or ways of living.

          We got it top down.

          And enough of that top down can chase us faster than tech is letting us run.

          They lose is assured.

          We win is not. Their ability to burn us all down in their vanity remains and their desire to do it out of spite is ramping up.

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