Check it out.

What could I possibly add?

I just heard the news about Ronnie Spector and I don’t know what to say. I loved her voice so much and she was a very special person and a dear friend. This just breaks my heart. Ronnie’s music and spirit will live forever.
Love & Mercy, Brianhttps://t.co/dXZKTMWv8a

— Brian Wilson (@BrianWilsonLive) January 12, 2022

Maxine and I were at the Brian Wilson concert where the conversation in the short clip above took place.  It was a terrific performance although, by now, 20 years ago!

Then there was this.  Sixty years ago.  The original GIRL GROUP.  What a different TIME and FEEL. And yet, Woodstock — as different a time as this was — was only SIX YEARS AWAY.

Check out this interview:

Manhattan Institute Fellow Mark Mills drives a COACH AND HORSES through the FOLLY of UTOPIAN GREEN.

PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THE HIDDEN MATERIAL COSTS IN ALTERNATIVE ENERGY.

AND ALSO TO HOW FRANCE WHICH, DESPITE GENERATING 80% OF ITS POWER VIA NUCLER, STILL DOUBLES ITS DAILY CARBON FOOTPRINT DUE TO THE POLLUTION IT IMPORTS.

There’s NO SUCH THING AS RENEWABLE ENERGY.  Everything costs SOMETHING to BRING TO MARKET.  ALL OF IT REQUIRES MACHINERY OR BATTERIES, AND ALL OF THOSE COMPONENTS WEAR OUT — THOUGH NOT BEFORE CREATING ADDITIONAL POLLUTION.

Here’s the video:

The Unsettling Truth About Green Energy

And here from the transcript, also included, are some highlights:

ENERGY IN GENERAL

• “Energy, to access it in a useful form for human beings, we have to have a machine to convert the energy into something useful. You have two costs. You have to have access to land where the energy is abundant. Always costs money, because somebody owns the land, a government or a private sector. Then you have to build machines to convert the energy from its native, raw form into something useful to us. That means you have to dig stuff out of the Earth, convert it into a machine, and run a machine.”
• All machines wear out. It just happens, like all humans wear out. That means there is no such thing as renewable energy machine. They all wear out. The thing you care about is how much stuff do I have to dig out of the ground to make a machine to produce a unit of energy? With the so-called renewables they need to dig out, on average, ten times… If you put it in accounting terms, that would be not 100%, not 1000%, but 10000% more materials per unit of energy delivered to society to make a machine that uses wind and solar rather . . .“

MINERAL SUPPLY/MANUFACTURE ISSUES

• “The critical stuff, we import. 90% of solar panels are imported in America. The critical minerals that solar panels are made from… A solar panel’s made from glass. The glass, the sand, you use natural gas to turn the sand into glass. That’s a huge quantity. Solar arrays and wind turbines use steel, they use concrete. These are common materials. The critical parts, the so-called energy minerals, cobalt, selenium, and neodymium, presidium, these magical-sounding elements from the periodic table, we’re not eager to mine them in America.“Not only are they mined elsewhere like Russia and South Africa, but most of the refining, which is critical to convert the raw mineral into useful metal, is done in China.”

OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT VS. OUR ENERGY FOOTPRINT

• “We’re going to switch from a small footprint on the planet to a huge footprint on the planet because the land area required per unit of energy when it’s green compared to hydrocarbons, it goes up tenfold. All bad.“

MACHINES AND WASTE

• “The thing that’s seductive about the green stuff, the so-called clean tech stuff, is that people think it’s free because it’s just there. I pointed out it’s total category error, misnomer. It’s not free. It’s expensive. You have to build machines.”
• “If you count the mining, first, that has an environmental impact by virtue of the fact that it’s mining. Secondary, we use oil to mine. We use big machines. The global mining industry uses as much oil as the global aviation industry did before the great lockdowns of 2020, so there’s oil use there. Then when you finish using the machines, because they get used up, they’re garbage.”
• “You have massive quantities of waste. The International Energy Agency calculates that the quantity of non-recyclable solar waste, the stuff from solar panels when they’re worn out, by the year 2040, 2050 will be greater than the quantity of plastic waste in the world today. For those who are environmentalists who worry about plastic waste, now we’re adding actually toxic material, because the metals and the glass are toxic metals.You want to be careful where you bury then. That quantity is bigger… There’s no… This illusion, there’s some kind of simple magic replacement is an illusion. It’s magical thinking.”

CLIMATE CHANGE AS RELIGION

• “I would say that there are people who believe things for what amount to religious reasons. This becomes an ethos, a way of thinking about the world. There are some people who believe things because they really haven’t done the homework. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They think they do. There are some people who believe things because they have an agenda.“
• “This ESG ethos, the environmental, sustainability, and governance ethos, which has been converted into a climate ethos, is very powerful.”

BATTERIES AND THE GRID

• “Texas builds big things. They have the biggest wind farms . . . They’re already embarking on building the world’s biggest battery storage farm for its grid . . . They finish the next year or so . . . I think it’s about $200 million facility . . . .“What does that get you in Texas? It buys about 30 seconds worth of storage of electricity from just Texas’ wind farms. 30 seconds. Not three days. On a grid, 30 seconds is useful, by the way, because when you want to manage these dynamic flows, you need 30 seconds worth of injection power. It’s kind of like, you think of a hybrid car. Hybrid car stops at a stop sign, and it starts again.

  “30 seconds. This is the world’s biggest battery farm, and that’s just for Texas. Just its wind. Not its whole grid, by the way. I’m just talking about storing the electricity produced by the Texas wind farms on the world’s biggest battery farm . . . .”

• “Last year in the United States, we had the biggest expansion in grid-scale storage. It was, I forget, 200% higher than the last five years combined. All the United States grid batteries that were added last year, which is a huge increase over anything we’ve added in the last decade, all of them combined would store… Just drum roll, eight to ten seconds worth of US electricity supply. That’s it. That’s where we are now.“They have plans to increase that 100-fold. Great. That gets you . . . You can do the math here. It gets you to minutes, a half hour. When you have lights go out, if you’re on on-demand power because there’s, let’s say, a whole day where the continent of the United States has no wind and no sun, it’s cloudy all day, and no wind. Does that ever happen? Yeah, we actually have data on this. There’s NOAA data goes back decades and decades.

  “We have many occurrences over the decades when, for several days, there’s no sun over the entire continent of the United States, cloudy, and no wind . . . This would be really inconvenient if the grid were run on wind and sun.”

I’ll stop here though the interview moves on to consider NUCLEAR ENERGY and the US’s dependence on China as per critical minerals and other resources.

But the picture Mills paints should be clear.  There’s NO UTOPIAN GREEN WORLD AWAITING, and to think that there is — is RISIBLE FOLLY.

Take your picks.

Don’t forget THESE GUYS.  They’re STILL out there.

And WE and the ISRAELIS continue to INCITE THEM, even as they DON’T BACK DOWN.

Imagine if we again had ACTIVE TERRORISM along with COVID.  The SYNERGIES would be devastating.  Specifically, as per the rule of law.

And this guy sounds like they’re already planning.

There appear to be galaxies without it.  Or is it even a “thing?”

Sounds like THEORY RECONCEPTUALIZATION TIME.

Astronomers Discover a Galaxy without Dark Matter

For those who are neither DARK MATTER nor DARK ENERGY savants, check out this video

The notion that the BULK OF REALITY, i.e. DISCERNIBLE PHENOMENA, occurs beyond our senses has always seemed to me INTUITIVELY self-evident.

As for DARK MATTER itself, I offer two poetic definitions, one anecdotal; the other, ZEN.

1. IRELAND as defined by Brendan Behan who when asked by his wife on returning from New York, how he found the Emerald Isle, replied . . . DARK!
2. THE THOUGHT BEFORE YOU HAVE IT. Although, that’s more likely DARK ENERGY.

Problem is, how do we DETECT . . . what we can’t even SENSE?

Short BULLSEYE video on the difference between VIRTUE SIGNALING and ACTUAL ACTIVISM meant to assist black people.

As McWhorter concludes, this is less about Martin Luther — religious conscience — and more about Martin Luther King — political activism.

The always engaging and uber-articulate Michael Pento shares with Adam Taggart his fear of a ROCKY Q2.

Citing the current 210% stock market to GDP ratio — as compared with the “mere” 142% in 2000 — Pento explains how if inflation doesn’t destroy the middle class and crater the economy, we’ll get there just as surely via a market-tanking rise in interest rates.

Take note and TAKE HEED.

Here’s the clip:

From Michael Shellenberger:

One of the major boosters of “natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewables, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we have made over the years. ‘Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,’ screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was ‘years in the making’ because Europe is ‘shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.‘”

Look merely at Germany.

“Now, a new analysis from Environmental Progress finds Germany increased its emissions last year and will likely increase them again this year. This year, German electricity generation coming from fossil fuels will be 44% compared to 39% in 2021 and 37 percent in 2020, assuming weather conditions and electricity demand are similar to 2021. Emissions from Germany’s power sector will rise from 244 million tons in 2021 to 264 million tons in 2022.”

“And the lack of nuclear energy underscores the need for more nuclear plants since they are reliable and operate independently of the weather when they are managed well. No matter how well a solar farm is managed, it can’t change the weather.“

“Now, with New England at grave risk of energy shortages for the exact same reasons as Europe, it’s time for the American people and their representatives to fully wake up to the reality that modern societies cannot rely on unreliable renewables. It would also help if the renewable energy industry, and its dogmatic supporters, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Rep. Sean Casten, and Rep. Jared Huffman, would stop trying to censor and otherwise shut down the people who raised the alarm about the coming crisis in the first place.“

THE REAL INCONVENIENT TRUTH IS THAT HUMANS WAITED TOO LONG TO ADDRESS THE VARIOUS HARMFUL EFFECTS OF AN INEVITABLY WARMING PLANET.

NOR HAVE WE BEEN WILLING — AWASH AS WE ARE IN THE COMFORTS OF MODERNITY — TO FOREGO EVEN THE LEAST OF THOSE COMFORTS, INCLUDING INCONVENINCES OF ANY KIND. AND SINCE OVER 80% OF THOSE COMFORTS ARE SOURCED FROM HYDROCARBONS, WHAT DID WE THINK WOULD HAPPEN?

PROBLEM IS, WE WEREN’T THINKING AT ALL, SO STEEPED WERE WE IN DENIAL.

RESOLUTIONS TO GO GREEN OR PARTLY GREEN BY SOME ARBITRARY DATE MEAN NOTHING AS THE GOALS THEY’VE ESTABLISHED WILL NOT BE MET.

IF WE SHUT DOWN CARBON WITHOUT TURNING ON NUCLEAR, GREEN POWER SOURCES ALONE WILL KEEP US NEITHER WARM NOR COOL.

AND THERE’S NOTHING GRETA THUNBERG AND HER CHILDREN’S CRUSADE CAN DO ABOUT IT. WELCOME TO REALITY, GRETA. WELCOME TO MUDDLING THROUGH!

. . . “Social Justice” Lunacy.

I didn’t like the look of this guy and was unsure I should vote for him, but I did, an action I now DEEPLY REGRET.

In his new position as Manhattan’s D.A., Alvin Bragg, just did about all one could do to INAUGUARATE New York’s next MAJOR CRIME WAVE.  And what will SOON FOLLOW will put current crime waves in San Francisco and Chicago, by comparison, IN THE SHADE.

From the New York Post:

Manhattan DA to Stop Seeking Prison Sentences in Slew of Criminal Cases

And here, as I see it, is the WORST OF IT:

“Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no “genuine risk of physical harm” to anyone. Armed robbery, a class B felony, would typically be punishable by a maximum of 25 years in prison, while petty larceny subjects offenders to up to 364 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.”

Former NYC police commissioner, Howard Safir, has already called on New Yorkers to start planning a RECALL ELECTION.

WHERE DO I SIGN UP TO HELP?