Mondays of Meaning*….and Meanness
I woke up to a chilly, rainy Saturday, a reminder of the winter that is just around the bend. Immediately seeing tweets propagandizing for the Palestinian cause did nothing to improve my mood. When members of a religion that does not recognize separation of church and state and offers no Bill of Rights take advantage of freedoms that they would not have in an Islamic Republic to accuse democracies of being Nazi, apartheid regimes, it is too much. I’m in the mood for mean.
I commented on the following tweet and must have hit a nerve. I got more views and more likes than I have ever gotten before.
My reply:
It is on college campuses that anti-Israel intellectualizing hides the underlying anti-Semitism. I am not anti-Jew, students, faculty and administrators say as they condemn the Jewish state as racist and apartheid. They support BDS—Boycott, Divest, Sanction. That would be in regard to Israel, of course, not in regard to the Islamic Repupblic of Iran, for example, that finances and exports terrorism. (With the aid of the Biden Administration and U.S. taxpayers, I might add)
As with criticism from the left in general, the targets are always chosen for their inability or reluctance to fight back. A critique of a Muslim state or group carries with it serious consequences, up to and including the death penalty—ideally, by sanction of the Q’uran—removal of one’s head after an appropriate amount of torture.
I am reminded of a quote from Arthur Koestler in another context.
How our voices boomed with righteous indignation, denouncing flaws in the procedure of justice in our comfortable democracies; and how silent we were when our comrades, without trial or conviction, were liquidated in the Socialist sixth of the earth.
Our voices, of course, refers to the left who at the time were apologists for the atrocities commited in the name of communism as the left today are apologists for the atrocities committed in the name of Islam.
On the Good News Front
Net Zero continues its death spiral toward absolute zero. Oil and coal production are at record levels worldwide. More and more people are beginning to realize that the West’s elite-led indulgence in delusional energy policy has a price. Subsidies for solar panels, solar rebates to wealthy homeowners and incentives to buy EVs that only the wealthy can afford are paid for by middle class taxpayers. The pollution costs are absorbed by the world’s poor, mostly poor Africans who mine the needed metals in deplorable working conditions but reap few of the benefits. Western enviro-elites never listen to the African people. They and the WEF know what is best for the peons. So, they bribe corrupt leaders to buy into their disastrously ruinous energy policies. Fortunately, with X and other social media, we can hear what African people are saying. @JusperMachugo is one African who is working to grow the economy of Kenya to benefit the people, not the self-aggranizing leadership.
Another individual fighting the good fight is Alex Epstein . His book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less is a must read for anyone who wants to be realistically informed on the subject of fossil fuels and their benefits. Alex’s book also provides ammunition to counter the lies, manipulations and misinformation of the renewables propaganda machine. Read it before attending your next neighborhood cocktail party if you are as tired as I am of being preached to by the energy ignorant. You may actually enjoy your cocktail for a change.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished and many good books go unread by the very people who need their message most. For his trouble, Alex is often treated to smear tactics as represented by the following tweet:
Barbara Boxer made the mistake in a Senate hearing of trying to humiliate Alex Epstein, rather than trying to refute the cogent arguments he was making in regard to misguided energy policy being proposed by Congress. She paid the price as do most who try to take on the extremely articulate and well informed Epstein.
It is tempting to ask Santa Claus to put a lump of coal in the Christmas stockings of Boxer and other net zeroites, but that would be a waste of good coal, a valuable resource critical for economic development of the Third World. Let them eat yellow cake. I, along with the world’s poor, love fossil fuels.
*Props to @jordanbpeterson