As American Greens rub their hands in gleeful anticipation, the lamps are going out all over Europe.
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we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime
Energy-starved Europe dims the lights, cuts the a/c
And not just Germany.
In the Netherlands, a new public program has been launched called “Flip the Switch.” People are not allowed to run the water in their showers for more than five minutes. Laundry is to be air dried on clothes lines, not in electric dryers. And citizens are being told to use sun shades and hand-held fans to keep cool and shut their air conditioners off. Spain just passed a law forbidding people from setting their thermostats lower than 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer, nor raising them above 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) in the winter. No details as to how they plan to monitor and enforce that law have been provided yet.
This is summer; they’re already planning community warming huts for the winter, just like the good old peasant days. No food, no energy, no liberty; a new society trained to rely on there betters for the essentials of life.
And they will be happy.
How sad that he died so young, but women want an equalizer more powerful than a boxing glove
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A Chicago teenager died days after he and a group attempted to rob an armed 32-year-old woman on the city's South Side.
The incident occurred July 29 in the Woodlawn area around 8:00 p.m., according to a report.
At least four males attempted to break into the woman's parked car when she confronted the would-be robbers.
One of the males whipped out a weapon and pointed it at the woman, the report noted.
Rather than surrendering or running away, the woman pulled out a weapon of her own and fired at the would-be criminals.
Dion Young, 13, was hit in the neck, authorities said.
The teenager was rushed to Comer Children's Hospital, where he died of his wounds on Tuesday, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.
The identities of the other suspects have not been confirmed, and an investigation into the incident is ongoing, the report noted.
They shoot polo horses, don't they?
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That building lot in Conyers Farm, 41 Hurlingham Drive, nee 1 Cowdray Park Drive, has dropped its price from July 29th’s of $6.950 to $5.8 million. That’s for the exiting new foundation and 12 acres; you can buy a 16,000 completed version from the struggling builder for $26,500, though it uses, for now, the 41 Hurlingham Drive address. Here’s an imagineered view of what that house might look like.
The sales history of this property offers a revealing look at the price history of the entire Conyers Farm development.
$4.975 1994
$6.500 1999
$8,5122,500 2001
Sometime after that 2001 purchase, an owner razed the existing structure and designed and got all necessary approvals for a new 16,000 sq. ft. house before losing his stamina and putting it up for sale, foundation and plans, in 2017 for $7 million. That dragged out until 2019, when, the price now down to $4 million, he let the listing expire.
He came back in 2021 at $6.950 million, as we have seen, is now asking $5.8.
Brown Brothers Harriman has two new Riverside transactions
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45 Wesskum Wood Road’s $2.995 listing price spurred a modest price war, and it sold yesterday for $3.050 (the link directs to RedFin, which (falsely) states that local rules require viewers to sign in with an email address, but it still has the pictures posted, which Brown Harris’ — a/k/a Brown Brothers Harriman — own listing does not).
Atlanta (!) buyers. If they moved up to escape the heat, they’re too early.
And 45 Willowmere Circle, listed at $5.150 on July 21, with showings beginning July 27th, is already gone, via what I hear was a fierce bidding war.
I alerted readers to this coming attraction back on July 21st, so if you were interested, but waited, figuring that there are no price wars in July, you’d have been right, until this year. when you were wrong.
Bonus material: Rob Johnson, listing agent for 45 Willowmere Circle, has another sale to report, 40 Otter Rock Drive, Belle Haven, $8.540 million. It was never on the MLS, so the link goes to a video from its previous listing, but same thing. New York City buyers.
This house was listed by its previous owners in April 2019 at $8.950 million and finally sold to Rob’s clients in September 2020 for $6.7 in 2020. COVID bounce. Or a dead cat bounce — we’ll have to wait to see which.
40 Otter Rock Drive
Anything to help the Party, comrades
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But mid-terms!
The Biden administration announced plans last Tuesday for another wave of oil sales from the SPR, as well as a proposal to help restock the reserve, according to a White House press release. The Biden administration aims to strategically sell oil from the reserve to boost supplies and fight soaring gas prices, but the rapid draining of U.S. stockpiles could cause taxpayers to foot the bill when the department inevitably refills its reserves. (RELATED: ‘Major Problems Down The Road’: Biden Drains Petroleum Reserves Of Crucial Type Of Crude)
“We filled the SPR at $60 a barrel … and now we’re looking to replenish at $90, meaning there is still a $30 per barrel delta, and we have sold millions and millions of barrels,” Daniel Turner, executive director of Power The Future, told the DCNF. “Biden is fleecing taxpayers to save the midterms.”
SPR barrels that need to be replaced will be bought back by the Department of Energy (DOE) at a fixed price of $90, in accordance with the DOE’s final rule-making, which could be higher than the market rate in the future. The Biden administration claims that by giving producers assurances about future oil prices they will increase their production levels and investments in SPR barrels.
“If the previous president had sold this scheme, the media would have crucified him as being in the pocket of ‘big oil,'” said Turner.
Not only would have, they did: March 25, 2020: “A bailout for Big Oil”. Democrats eliminate $3 billion strategic petroleum reserve
Senate Democrats say they were able to eliminate a “bailout for Big Oil” to help secure a bipartisan agreement on a $2 trillion coronavirus economic relief package Wednesday.
Democratic leader Chuck Schumer released a summary of the agreement that says it no longer contains $3 billion to fulfill President Trump’s order to buy low-priced oil to restock the nation’s emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Mind you, because he can be an idiot and a liar (not always, but sometimes), Trump now says, falsly, that he built up the reserve to 100% capacity. I say idiotic because he already had the perfect attack; the democrats killed his proposal to refill it at $30 barrel instead of $90, but sometimes the man just can’t help himself.
But let’s continue.
The White House is fixated on lowering gas prices as it believes fuel prices most directly affect voters’ everyday lives and, therefore, their perception of the economy, according to Politico. The White House also praised its efforts to reduce gas prices over the last 49 days on Tuesday; however, gas prices are still about $1 higher than they were at the same time in 2021, according to AAA.
“The administration is trying to incentivize production by allowing oil firms to lock in a fixed price, Stephen Pavlick, head of policy at Renaissance Macro, told the DCNF.
“Oil firms aren’t stupid and they’re not going to do that unless they believe the fixed price will be above the market rate, and if that’s the case then taxpayers will be overpaying to resupply something that arguably never should’ve been tapped in the first place,” Pavlick continued.
It's all about power, control, and punishment of the non-obeisant
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Mayor Bowser cracks her whip
D.C. schools will students who refuse to be vaccinated
Vaccines and masks don’t protect against contracting Covid — just ask our quadruple-boosted “president”, and, as our own CDC director admits, that they do not prevent the transmission of the virus, despite the wild claims of our hysterical media and “scientists”.
So why this new directive? Because they can.
Two essays make the same point
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WHEN IS IT TIME TO DISTRUST EXPERTS? AS KAMPALLAwalla ding dong REMINDS US, “that time is every day”
Viet Nam and the War on Poverty began my own distrust of experts and COVID finished it off, with decades of expert-caused debacles along the way. And then there’s global warming ….
Victor Davis Hanson: Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class
For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid “transition” to “green” energy was the world’s preordained future — regardless of the costs.
Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to “renewable energy.”
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As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood — the dirtiest of modern fuels — to endure the cold. And there is further talk of “warm rooms,” where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.
Sri Lanka may be the first modern nation to adopt deliberate policies that have led to mass hunger and bankruptcy. The government, for a variety of reasons, listened to foreign advocates of back-to-nature organic farming, specifically outright abandonment of highly effective synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
The result was endemic crop failure. Cash crops for export failed. Widespread hunger followed. Without foreign exchange, it became impossible to import key staples like food and fuel.
Sri Lanka once had a per capita income twice that of nearby India. Now it cannot feed or fuel itself.
Unfortunately, its incompetent government trusted radical environmental advisors, many of them foreign experts. Sri Lanka believed it could become the woke darling of the “Environmental, Social, Governance” movement, and in that way draw in unlimited Western woke investment.
Instead, it has embraced a policy of national suicide.
Recently, a group of 55 distinguished pro-administration economists assured us that President Joe Biden’s massive borrowing and new entitlements agenda were not inflationary. In September 2021, these economists with 14 Nobel prize winners among them declared that Biden’s inflationary policies would actually “ease” inflation.
Last month, inflation spiked to an annualized rate of 9.1%.
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In late July 2021, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that the Taliban takeover “was not a foregone conclusion.” He bragged that 34 provincial capitals were still in Afghan government hands.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nodded in approval. Less than a month later, the entire Afghan government collapsed. The American military fled in its most ignominious retreat in over 50 years. Milley had been parroting Biden’s earlier prompt that a Taliban victory after the American evacuation was “highly unlikely.”
On the eve of the 2020 election, news accounts revealed some of the lurid contents on Hunter Biden’s lost laptop. Emails and photos began to incriminate the entire Biden family for leveraging millions of dollars from foreign grandees for access to a bought Joe Biden.
Fifty retired intelligence officers, however, without evidence, swore that the laptop’s appearance could be due to “Russian disinformation.” Yet after authentication — Hunter himself never denied the lost laptop was his — few if any of those marquee “experts” apologized for their election-driven dissimulation.
At the height of the massive 2020 enforced quarantine and lockdowns, some 1,200 medical and health “professionals” signed a petition claiming that thousands of left-wing protestors should be exempt from the very quarantine they had insisted on for others.
The experts absurdly claimed that denying tens of thousands the right to break quarantines to protest in the street was a greater health threat than COVID-19.
FBI Director James Comey doggedly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax. At one point he hired the discredited Christopher Steele to supply the FBI with information from his fantasy dossier.
Once called to account, on some 245 occasions before Congress, Comey swore that he could either not remember or had no knowledge about the questions asked of him.
His successor FBI interim Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal officials. Special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller himself swore under oath that he knew nothing either about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS — the twin catalysts for his entire investigation.
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All these depressing examples have one common denominator: Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters, rather than the truth.
In the process, they caused untold damage to their country and fellow citizens. They disgraced their profession. They tarnished the scientific community. And sold their souls to ideologues.
Is it any wonder why the Western public has lost confidence in their degreed and credentialed elites?
Raymond Ibraham: Where Has it Gotten Us? A look back at 17 Years of Killing Terrorist Leaders
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the chief ideologue and, for a decade, leader of al-Qaeda, was finally killed, 21 years after the terror strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. This is certainly welcome news, if only because someone like al-Zawahiri deserved his fate.
But while we can all celebrate, his death will, unfortunately, and despite Joe Biden’s August 1 speech, have zero impact on the global jihad. This dismal prognostication is fortified by the fact that, for nearly 17 years now, every time an Islamic terror leader has been killed, politicians and media exulted, portraying the death as a “major blow” to the jihad; and, for nearly 17 years now, I have responded by recycling an article that I first wrote in 2006, titled “The West’s Multi-Headed Monster.”
Although I changed the names of the jihadi leaders killed to suit the occasion—first Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, then Abu Hamza al-Masri, then Abu Laith al-Libi, then Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Misri, then Osama bin Laden, then Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and now Ayman al-Zawahiri — my conclusion always remained the same:
The West’s plight vis-à-vis radical Islam is therefore akin to Hercules’ epic encounter with the multi-headed Hydra-monster. Every time the mythical strongman lopped off one of the monster’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. To slay the beast once and for all, Hercules learned to cauterize the stumps with fire, thereby preventing any more heads from sprouting out. Similarly, while the West continues to lop off monster heads like figurehead Zarqawi [or Zawahiri, bin Laden, al-Baghdadi, et al] it is imperative to treat the malady—radical Islam—in order to ultimately prevail. Victory can only come when the violent ideologies of Islam are cauterized with fire. But alas, the Hydra-monster is myth, while radical Islam is stark reality.
Consider, for instance, all the exultation that took place in 2006 after al-Zarqawi — the forefather of the Islamic State, or “Al-Qaeda Second Generation” — was killed. Then, almost every major politician, including President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, gave some sort of victory speech. The New York Times called his death a “major watershed in the war.”
Similarly, in 2008, after Abu Laith al-Libi was killed, Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) issued a statement saying that his death “clearly will have an impact on the radical jihadist movement.”
More myopic triumphalism was in the air after Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri were killed in 2010 during a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation. Then, none other than Joe Biden, serving as vice president, said the “deaths are potentially devastating blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq [the embryonic form of the Islamic State],” adding, “This operation is evidence in my view, that the future of Iraq will not be shaped by those who would seek to destroy that country” — a prediction that proved to be woefully wrong.
Similarly, U.S. commander Gen. Raymond Odierno asserted that “The death of these terrorists is potentially the most significant blow to al-Qaeda in Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency,” adding that it would be “very difficult” for the al Qaeda network to replace the two men.
And who could forget all the media triumphalism, if not hysteria, surrounding the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden? Then, CNN security analyst Peter Bergen declared that “Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror. We can just sort of announce that right now.” Insisting that the “iconic nature of bin Laden’s persona” cannot be replaced, Bergen further suggested that “It’s time to move on.”
Another CNN analyst, Fareed Zakaria, assured us that “this is a huge, devastating blow to al-Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al-Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.”
In retrospect, surely all these assertions and assurances have proven to be immensely puerile — even for “mainstream media analysts.” The only significant development following the killing of bin Laden was the birth, spread, and subsequent hegemony of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) — an organization that made al-Qaeda pale in comparison when it came to savagery and atrocities.
To recap: for years, Americans were repeatedly told that al-Qaeda was suffering “devastating blows”; that the killing of individual jihadis were “major watersheds in the war”; that “the end of the war on terror” occurred in 2011, when bin Laden died (“it’s time to move on,” counseled Peter Bergen); and “that the future of Iraq will not be shaped by those who would seek to destroy that country,” according to Biden.
Yet, lo and behold: an Islamic State, a caliphate engaged in the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century, was born — despite the deaths of individual jihadi leaders, including the notorious bin Laden.
In light of this, should one expect the jihad to disappear now that al-Zawahiri is dead? Joe Biden seems to still harbor such hopes. During his recent victory speech, and after opening with a typical contradiction — “You know, al-Zawahiri was bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all the — the whole time. He was his number-two man — the U.S. president said: “He [Zawahiri] will never again — never again allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe haven because he is gone.” Newsflash: with or without al-Zawahiri, Afghanistan has been and continues to be a “terrorist safe haven.”