Our neighbor works for a public utility district. He works directly to maintain our grid. He says it is not robust and they struggle to maintain it, much less expand it. Our area is one that is growing very quickly in population because we had a good thing going before the creeping liberal rot made its way from Seattle to us. But it is here. He says getting parts to maintain equipment and finding good employees have gotten more difficult. Vaccine mandates didn’t help. We saw during covid what even a small supply chain disruption could do.

Idiot governor Inslee is waging war on both natural gas AND internal combustion vehicles. New homes can’t be built that use natural gas. He is imposing ridiculous requirements with lofty, virtue-signalling and totalitarian policies that force everything (EVERYTHING) onto the electrical grid.

I ask you. Wouldn’t competent leadership move into using different sources of energy gradually, instead of forcing too-quick dependence on ONE source? In fact, ALWAYS having a variety of energy sources would be the best. But that’s exactly what “leadership” is not doing.

Someone is profiting from the manufacture of electric cars and batteries, and there is a corresponding and very tempting conduit of control that the electrical grid provides to those who want to control us. That’s not a conspiracy theory. The slavering quest for narrow energy dependence, because it IS unwise and crippling for human flourishing, is one of the big reveals of the rigged and corrupt system we’re living under.

Provide multiple energy sources, innovate, and let people decide which to use. Joe gets his EV and Jose and Maria get their 2002 Honda Accord. The web of transportation is stronger. But don’t skew hundreds of millions of dollars over onto making spots for a diminishing number of people (EVs are not practical and sales are declining) to plug cars into chargers. We have more important needs in this country.

My husband and I both worked for electric utilities, my husband up until he retired two years ago.  This country has a LOOMING electric grid reliability problem.  Not just the grid but ALL utilities and all forms of energy and all transportation and all infrastructure.  This is because the people who uphold and maintain all of this are largely older generation MALES, and they are retiring in droves. Yes women are majoring a bit more in engineering and sciences but not in nearly enough numbers to replace the old guys, and not in the boots on the ground work (skilled labor).  The young men are first of all, way fewer in numbers as the birth rate has crashed, and secondly, experiencing an epidemic of mental problems rendering them unable to do much but play video games in mom's basement or major in "journalism" in college.

There is such a brain drain in the energy industry that my husband was offered almost $250,000 a year to come back in an engineering management position but they wanted a 3 year commitment and he said fuck that, no way. 

Getting parts is a huge problem, because we simply don't make them in the U.S. anymore, we don't make our own steel, we don't make our own electronics.  There were big advantages to globalism like taking advantage of cheap labor overseas but the price we pay is loss of control over our own supply chain. Quality control is a HUGE problem. Anything made in China is suspect.

Plants and equipment are aging out and not being replaced.  The cheapest most efficient ways to generate electricity are being phased out by incredibly destructive leftist policies based on eliminating fossil fuels or hobbling nuclear generation with crushing regulatory requirements. The latter was a long term problem starting in the 80s or before.  I know, I worked at a nuke plant. It was like 90% suck the dick of the federal government and 10% actually get something accomplished.  (Excuse my graphic analogy, I've been listening to too much Styx, lol!)  If not for that we'd have a robust base of nuclear generation.

Gosh Becky, you’ve been through the wringer!  Glad there were people there to help you and no, not a coincidence.  Hope the sense of smell improves.

WARNING!  DISGUSTING AND EMOTIONAL AND DISTURBING AND CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS

So in the Dean Phillips thread I mentioned that Jordan Peterson now favors banning ALL transition surgeries, which my first reaction, as a libertarian (small “l”) is, no, if you’re an adult and you want this, no matter how stupid it is, go for it.  Just don’t make me pay for it.

After listening to just the first ten minutes of this, I’m starting to see where Peterson is coming from.  As long as the truth about these surgeries is suppressed, how can an adult make an informed decision?

Scott was 42 when he had the fake penis surgery.  Anyone would assume he was mature enough to understand and consent, and he was mature enough, but the medical community and media withheld information he needed for informed consent.  Yet another reason the First Amendment is so important.  In this case it is capitalist “greed” on the part of the gender reassignment industry that is to blame, but it is vastly enabled by the sick transgender activist movement which has wormed its way into the leftist ideological propaganda machine.  Without that part, the truth about these surgeries would quickly come into the open.

But the problem with simply banning these surgeries for everyone is that the right has the tendency to go to the extreme, making problems for people who aren’t the targets of the policy.  My biggest beef with the right at the moment is the movement to ban IV fertilization.  The issue is that the fertilized egg is now a full set of human DNA and in order to produce one live baby, you have to sacrifice a few more of the zygotes.  The right, being pro-life, considers this equal to abortion.

My objection to that characterization is that rather than subtracting a human life as the net result, which regular abortion does, you are actually adding a human life to the world by using this process, that otherwise would not exist.  Yes, you must create and then sacrifice one or more other zygotes to get one to survive, but in this case they are actually literally a “clump of cells”.  Unlike what they become just a few short weeks after implantation into a womb.  They are not differentiated cells; there is no central nervous system so no possibility of consciousness.  Yes they have a full set of human DNA but so does any one of your skin cells: that doesn’t make a discarded skin cell a “person” with a right to life.

I don’t like the idea of needing to make several zygotes to get one of them to grow into a baby, but that’s where the technology is right now.  I’ve heard conservatives suggest you should just make one and implant it, but they lack understanding of how this works.  If you try to do it that way the odds are you will need to make many attempts before you’re successful if ever, and women have a clock running out on their ability to carry a pregnancy. To me the goal is to make more babies. IVF is doing that. Leave it the hell alone.

I suspect that what’s got a bee in the bonnet of the conservatives against IVF is the fact that gay couples are now using it to have children.  To that I say, you are against abortion, so you are fine with a low IQ welfare mom in the ghetto having the unwanted baby who will grow up to be a criminal thug, but you have a problem with a gay couple who might be well off tax paying citizens having a baby.  I admit that’s not ideal:  I firmly believe children are best raised by one man plus one woman in a committed marriage.  But I’m talking about public policy and the unintended consequences.  The majority of IVF clients are heterosexual married couples with financial means. You ban abortion and IVF, you get fewer children of traditional straight couples, and more children growing up without fathers in poverty.

Anyway how this relates to gender surgeries, is if we were to ban these surgeries for adults, what about the soldier who had his junk blown off in war?  What about men with penile cancer who would like some sort of package approximation rebuilt?  Oh we can make exceptions for that; well that didn’t work out so well for banning the abortion pill. They made exceptions for miscarriage, but in the real world women ended up unable to get the pills to treat miscarriage because of doctors’ legal fears.  They had to let the dead baby rot inside them for a while and then undergo surgical removal.  This damages a woman’s ability to try for another pregnancy.  If the goal is to have more babies, and I think that should be the goal, we need to be very careful not to address these matters with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. 

I have the same reservation about Peterson’s proposal to ban transition surgeries for adults. But if I had to vote on it right now I might well vote to ban, but I prefer dismantling the whole grip the left and their sick ideologies have on society right now.

It’s astounding how fast this country flipped from normal world to something where we elevate the abnormal on a national level to some kind of honored status where we get censored and persecuted if we don’t celebrate said abnormality.

It inverts the most basic biological reality of not just us but the whole animal kingdom and is the literal mechanism by which we continue on. “Heteronormativity” is now a pejorative.

April Fool’s.

"Lawyer" and "Am I being detained?"  You're under no obligation to answer their questions.

And if they don’t show ID, call 911 and tell them you are being harassed by strangers impersonating FBI agents.

He said, "We do this all day."  So that's what the FBI busies themselves with?  Harassing middle aged ladies about their Facebook posts? 

Why don't they go arrest all the illegals squatting in people's homes instead? 

But if taxation is extortion, then it is a form of coercion. Thus I think all reduction of coercion, no matter how selective or how much we may dislike the reason for the reduction, is good morally.
Otherwise one is advocating for coercion of some people but not others.

I agree in theory. In reality there are all kinds of unfair tax law loopholes that favor one group over another, yet I believe it is moral to try to reduce your own taxes by taking advantage of any legal loophole you can. However, by extension this would also apply to cheating.  If taxation is immoral and extortion, then “the law” is not moral and we are therefore not obliged to obey it.

I’m not saying that is my position. I am not an anarchist. I am a pragmatic libertarian. Small government and very low tax rate if needed at all is ideal which of course we are far from right now.

These are the sort of moral conundra created by having the state involved in everyone else’s business.

Agree!