Friday, December 11, 2009

Call it Enviro-Friday Morning

We have flat-out idiocy from the CA government(big surprise, huh?)
On Tuesday, we asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger why he wouldn’t even consider suspending AB 32, the state’s landmark 2006 anti-global warming law, given that state unemployment was 12.5 percent. Schwarzenegger threatened to veto AB 32, which will force Californians to use cleaner but costlier sources of energy, unless it included a provision allowing for its suspension in times of economic distress.

The response from the governor’s office: “Your question is premised on an unproven assertion that implementation of AB 32 would be harmful to the economy when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”

At roughly the same time, veteran Sacramento reporter-turned-blogger Greg Lucas broke the story that a draft report by a state advisory committee estimated that implementing AB 32 would cost businesses, government agencies, private organizations and individuals who emit greenhouse gases from $48 billion to $143 billion from 2012 to 2020.
...
The next morning, the evidence that the governor was untethered from economic reality grew even more. A report on the growth in “green jobs” – which Schwarzenegger says will be the foundation of the future California economy – noted that even though they had grown 36 percent statewide since 1995, they still constituted less than 1 percent of all state jobs. The report offered no reason of any kind to believe the governor’s premise they will be California’s economic salvation.

Incredibly, Schwarzenegger’s aides sent out nearly a dozen mass e-mails citing news coverage of the report, as if it validated his claims about the boundless benefits of the coming green economy
.


We have an interesting line from a story on a greeny idea that fell apart:
In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. "As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime," wrote Newsweek in 1976.

Soleri designed models of many futuristic communities, guided by his intense dislike of U.S.-style development. "The 'American Dream,' as physically embodied in the single-family house," he once wrote, "has to be scrapped and reinvented in terms which are coherent with the human and biospheric reality."

This has been hit on by a lot of greeny socialists: you shouldn't be allowed to have your own house and yard, let alone a bigger property, oh no; you should have to live in an anthill that they consider 'proper' housing for us nasty humans. To which most people invite them to go to the nether regions of hell, and if you come to drag me from my house I'll introduce you to Mr. Pumpgun.


Another piece on the fetish the clowns have for rail systems, even when some buses would be cheaper and better. Of course, they'll be spending other peoples money on it, so why should they care what it costs? "It's RAIL, it's GREEN, and you'll pay for it whether you like or use it or not!"


And my last note of idiocy, and why our schools and so many students are so screwed up,
I was told that 2 + 2 = 4 is merely a matter of opinion. I was told that Gödel showed mathematics could be inconsistent, so anything goes. (Actually, 2 + 2 = 4 is a theorem of Presburger arithmetic, which is arithmetic with addition and subtraction only, and Presburger arithmetic is, and has been proven to be, decidable, complete, and consistent.

I’ve had this experience several times now. University faculties now teach that truth is whatever the consensus of the faculty says it is (this was made explicit is the Berkeley faculty handbook a few years ago). This idea that the ruling group of faculty can establish truth by authority, even over the truths of mathematics like 2 + 2 = 4, has a chilling Orwellian flavor.

Literally
.
And there's that word 'consensus' again; interesting where all it pops up, isn't it?

No comments: