Thursday, July 28, 2016

Is This the "Big Whoops" from the BioFuels Loons?

I've written alot about the ongoing stupidity of the ethanol mandate over the years (even going so far as to excoriate my man George W. Bush's sop to this mega-blunder).

Well, now we have what is perhaps the big "Whoops" on the whole ethanol front.  Apparently, the corn that one must grow to produce ethanol is requiring too much pure, unspoiled land.
Environmentalists who once championed biofuels as a way to cut pollution are now turning against a U.S. program that puts renewable fuels in cars, citing higher-than-expected carbon dioxide emissions and reduced wildlife habitat.
More than a decade after conservationists helped persuade Congress to require adding corn-based ethanol and other biofuels to gasoline, some groups regret the resulting agricultural runoff in waterways and conversion of prairies to cropland -- improving the odds that lawmakers might seek changes to the program next year.
"The big green groups that got invested in biofuels are tacitly realizing the blunder," said John DeCicco, a research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute who previously focused on automotive strategies at the Environmental Defense Fund. "It’s really hard for the people who really -- shall we say -- hate oil viscerally, to think that this alternative that we’ve been promoting is today worse than oil."
Wow.  It is almost as if lefties don't think through the consequences of their policies...

Actually, the nub is revealed in the last paragraph, greenies are so driven to rage by the thought of hydrocarbons that they can't think straight.  The whole ethanol idiocy has led to, principally, massive overplanting of corn which has meant higher food prices and natural habitat encroachment.  Way to go Exxon Haters!

RTWT, the greenies were wrong on every count - lower emissions, increase wildlife habitat, all of it.  It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.  But hey, let's listen to these dodos on the next big dumb idea.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

How Bloomberg "News" Makes the Liberal Sausage

OK, here goes...liberal think tank comes up with a "simulator" that, no matter what inputs you enter, spits out results that say we need more liberal policy.  That's step 1.  Step 2 is that a "news" agency that is somewhat famous for coordinating with liberal actors in government and politics, publishes this "simulation" as news, even going so far as to pretend it is true, until the third paragraph, where they tell you it isn't true, but that you ought to believe it anyway.

This is how the news gets made folks...
A real estate developer wanted to increase affordable housing in Denver, trying to make fiscal sense out of a plan to build rental apartments for people making only 30 percent of the area's median income—the kind of housing America desperately needs. He discovered that, no matter what lever he moved or compromise he made, he was going to need some money from the government to make it work. Then he was going to need some more. 
Almost one in four U.S. renters spends more on housing than they can afford, according to a report in June from Harvard University‘s Joint Center for Housing Studies—and the problem gets worse at the lower end of the income spectrum. About 10 million renter households earn 30 percent or less of the area median income, accounting for a quarter of the renter population. The U.S. would need to add more than 7 million cheap apartments to meet demand from such extremely low-income renters, according to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition
“If we want to prioritize closing the gap for low-income households, we’re going to need more funding from public subsidy,” said Erika Poethig, director of urban policy initiatives at the Urban Institute, which published an online simulator Tuesday for the purpose of illustrating the challenges to building new affordable housing. Our Denver developer above is fictional, but he's an illustration of what that simulator churns out: No matter how you slice it, creating the affordable housing needed today probably requires government help.
Hey, how about this crazy idea...don't do it.  Maybe Denver shouldn't have affordable housing.  Maybe if no one can make it work, it shouldn't be done. 

Dumbest Idea of the Day (Shocker, Not From the DNC)

Wow.  An idea stupider than anything you'll hear coming out of the DNC coronation in Philly...Amtrak is going to re-launch a magazine!

Yes, crappy, money-losing, government run train service that people hate needs "long-form journalism"!

Friday, July 22, 2016

Why We Have Trump

THIS is why we have Trump.  Or THIS.

MSM elites can bitch and moan all they want about angry white males or Roger Ailes or any other hobgoblin of their obviously superior minds, but it is this sort of maddening leftist idiocy that gives rise to a guy like Trump.

If It's Happening In California...

As I have long said...probably the number one result of eight years of Obama (and Obamaism) is that America will be that much more armed to the teeth...and I don't mean the military.