Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 43

• I wonder if the mysterious lights some people in the sky are actually spirit orbs that ghost investigators see in haunted locations like cemeteries and buildings. I am not saying all UFOs are spirit orbs—only the UFOs that look like lights. I mean who says orbs cannot travel in the sky.
• If earth has been visited by extraterrestrials since the telescope has been invented then why hasn't any ground telescopes and even the Hubble telescope seen them?
• Liberty and innovation cannot be sustained under socialism.
• Race doesn’t matter. I mean whatever happened to “judge a person by the content of his character not by the color of his skin.”
• Relativism + positivism + historicism = borderline insanity.
• I wonder how many people who are against the border wall have a wall around their yards or live in gated communities to keep out the riff-raff?
• Cultural appropriation is a dumb concept. Cultures change and sometimes they change through adoption or borrowing of another culture’s ideas, arts, etc. All free cultures do this. America is no exception. Cultural anthropologists call this process of borrowing, diffusion.
• Jefferson Davis like LBJ were leaders who thought they knew better than their generals to run a war. Because of this arrogance they meddled in their wars and lost. President Lincoln on the other hand listened to his generals. 
• If no news cameras show up at a protest, do the protesters disband and go home?
• Three stages of political philosophy from lowest maturity to highest: Progressivism (child) --> Libertarianism (adolescent) –> Conservatism (adult).

Facial recognition is coming to hotels to make check-in easier—and much creepier

From Fast Company.com (April 1):

Alibaba has created the hotel of the future and it’s wild, wonderful, and just a little creepy. FlyZoo, which is reportedly a Chinese pun for “must stay,” is a 290-room ultra-modern boutique hotel in Hangzhou, China that lets guests play with technology, check in with ease, and spend the night in the future for a low price of around $205—and at the cost of your privacy.

Thanks to technology culled from across Alibaba’s vast network of companies, most notably Fliggy, Alibaba’s online travel platform, guests can immerse themselves in the crossroads of hospitality and technology. As Skift reports, it all starts with booking through an app, where guests can pick a floor and a view, exploring the minimalist room. Check-in is a breeze, too, especially for Chinese guests who can use the app to scan their faces to expedite the process (for now foreign guests must use lobby kiosks). No need to pick up a key from the lobby, because the elevator will scan your face and take you to the correct floor, and your face will open the room door. Once inside the room, requests for water, new towels, extra pillows, and more will be taken by Ask Genie, Alibaba’s Alexa-like assistant, and a three-foot tall robot will deliver the goods. Too hot? Too cold? Too many lights? Ask Genie to shut the curtains or crank up the heat.

Hungry guests can head to the hotel restaurant where a robotic bartender is mixing up drinks and food ordered via the FlyZoo app will be delivered by other robots. Forget your wallet? No problem: Face-scanning technology will send the charges straight to your room bill.

The hotel’s technology is impressive, because as Skift notes, Alibaba had a lot of tech to pull from: There’s Fliggy providing user experience design, Damo Academy for artificial intelligence, data analytics labs, and robotics, and Tmall Marketplace for marketing. [read more]

I wonder if the face-recognition technology passes on its data to the appropriate Chinese gov’t agency? Just wondering.

At Last! Protection Against EMP!

From Dick Morris.com (April 1):

For years now, we have been warned that rogue states — particularly North Korea — could turn our country into a living hell by exploding a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere over America. The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from such a blast would fry our electrical circuits and transistors and put much of our grid out of operation. A Caracas-style blackout would descend on our nation and last, potentially, for weeks or even months.

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Despite the scientific consensus that this catastrophe is quite possible, our government has done little or nothing to protect us. Until now. President Donald Trump has acted. Finally.

After years of pressure from Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Ron Johnson (WI) and Democrats like Senator Edward Markey (MA) and former Senator Jim Webb (Virginia), Trump issued an executive order to protect us against EMP.

The order centralizes anti-EMP planning in the White House, taking it away from the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security which have underestimated the importance of anti-EMP measures.

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, former chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, explains that the order “states that the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), working with the National Security Council and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, ‘shall coordinate the development and implementation of executive branch actions to assess, prioritize, and manage the risks of EMPs.'” [read more]

This executive order should be law like a lot of President Trump’s executive orders. It seems to me that Trump is the only one in power looking after America. Congress sure isn’t especially the Dems. Although, when the Republicans were in power they sat on their butts. They should get on board the Trump train.

To Fight Overpopulation, Food Scientists Develop Maggot Sausage and Insect Ice Cream

From FEE.org (May 3):

To provide more protein for a world with a growing population, scientists are developing meat alternatives such as maggot sausages, the New York Post reports:

Food scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia are incorporating insects such as maggots and locusts into a range of specialty foods, including sausage, as well as formulating sustainable insect-based feeds for the livestock themselves.

Hoffman says conventional livestock production will soon be unable to meet global demand for meat, so other fillers and alternatives will be needed to supplement the food supply with sufficient protein sources.

“An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food,” says meat science professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman. “Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots?” “One of my students has created a very tasty insect ice cream.”

[read more]

Maggot sausage? That’s kind of disgusting. Although a bird might like it.

As a side note, this is what God commanded about insects:

Every flying swarming creature going on all four, it is an abomination to you. Only, this you may eat of any swarming thing which flies, which goes on all four, which has legs above its feet, to leap with them on the earth; these are those you may eat: the locusts according to its kind, and the bald locust according to its kind, and the long horned grasshopper according to its kind, and the short horned grasshopper according to its kind. But every swarming thing which flies, which has four feet, it is unclean to you. (Leviticus 11:20-23).

So, it looks like locusts are okay to eat. Maggots not so much.

McDonald's will use AI to automatically tweak drive-thru menus

From Engadget.com (Mar. 26):

When you roll up to a McDonald's drive-thru in the near future, you might notice the menu changing while you're ordering to persuade you to buy a few more items. The fast food giant is buying machine learning startup Dynamic Yield for a reported $300 million, and the first stop for the company's AI is the drive-thru window.

The system will look at factors such as the weather, time, local events, traffic levels at the restaurant and on nearby roads, historical sales data, currently popular items and even what you're ordering to optimize menu displays at drive-thru windows. It might, for instance, promote the McFlurry or iced coffees on hot days, or suggest simpler items that are faster for employees to prepare if there's a long line.

McDonald's tested the AI at several restaurants last year, and executive vice president and global chief information officer Daniel Henry told Wired he expects more than 1,000 locations will be using it within the next three months. The system will ultimately reach all 14,000 US restaurants and expand to other markets. McDonald's also plans to add the AI to self-order kiosks and its mobile app, and perhaps other parts of its business, such as kitchens. [read more]

This almost falls into the category of “what-else-is-knew?” I suppose eventually the AI menu will just learn what a customer likes at a certain time of day via facial recognition. “Hello, Bob. Are you going to order a medium fry, a Big Mac and a large Coke today?” Hopefully, the AI won’t just make the order for you without asking. Customers won’t like that. Well, most won’t.

Why Europe Axed Its Wealth Taxes

From National Review.com (Mar. 27):

More than a dozen European countries used to have wealth taxes, but nearly all of these countries repealed them, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Sweden. Wealth taxes survive only in Norway, Spain, and Switzerland.

Before repeal, European wealth taxes — with a variety of rates and bases — tended to raise only about 0.2 percent of gross domestic product in revenue, based on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data. That is only 1/40th as much as the U.S. federal income tax raises.

Yet for little revenue, wealth taxes are difficult to administer and enforce. They may require taxpayers to report the values of financial securities, homes, furniture, artwork, jewelry, antiques, vehicles, boats, pension rights, family businesses, farm assets, land, intellectual property, and much else. But owners do not know the market values of many assets, and values change over time, so costly wealth-tax compliance would only make accountants wealthy.

And what about wealth held abroad? There is no way the Internal Revenue Service would be able to track down and value everything U.S. residents owned on a global basis.

In the 1970s, the British Labour government pushed for a national wealth tax and failed. The minister in charge, Denis Healey, said in his memoirs, “We had committed ourselves to a Wealth Tax; but in five years I found it impossible to draft one which would yield enough revenue to be worth the administrative cost and political hassle.”

Another problem is that wealth taxes have disappearing tax bases. In Europe, politicians carved out an increasing number of exemptions from tax bases to appease special interests. Exemptions were often provided for farm assets, small businesses, pension assets, artwork, and other items.

And here’s the kicker: Since the base of wealth taxes is net wealth, debt is deductible. That allowed wealthy Europeans to jack up their borrowing and invest in the exempted assets to shrink their tax bases. If a wealth tax were imposed in the United States, the farm lobby would most certainly get farmland excluded. Then rich people would borrow heavily and invest in farmland, thus shrinking the tax base and distorting the economy.

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If liberals want tax fairness, they should push to close existing income-tax loopholes. The tax exemption for municipal-bond interest, for example, would be a good target because it mainly benefits the wealthy. Closing such loopholes would reduce distortions and simplify taxation — the exact opposite effects of adding a wealth tax. [read more]

It’s not about fairness (although that’s what the Left says. Well, they say they want “equality”) it’s about power and control.

Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Eliminate Student Debt Is Worse Than You Think

From FEE.org (May 3):

Politicians Competing to Offer the Most "Free" Stuff

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Presidential candidates and campaigns have been offering “a chicken in every pot” for at least 90 years now, but this election cycle seems to be all about offering more “free” stuff than the other candidates. Some have even gone so far as to claim it’s not a problem that the government prints money to cover such things, as if the concept of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, or, more accurately, Mindless Magical Thinking) makes it okay. This is beyond the scope of this discussion but is more than adequately covered here, here, here, here, here, and here.

One point relevant to this discussion is that MMT is based on the premise that government can allocate resources more efficiently than the alternative had their exercise of monopoly power over the currency not taken place—a premise without a single example in all of human history.

The latest salvo in the Free Stuff Wars comes from Elizabeth Warren and her plan to cancel (most) student loans and offer free college to everyone. Some have even suggested, most notably the Levy Institute at Bard College (affiliated with self-described socialist Joseph Stiglitz), that such a plan would “super-charge the economy.” The premise, as we shall see, is absurd on its face. Surely, this is an effective way to woo millennials with college debt. As George Bernard Shaw noted, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul,” but that hardly makes it a sound idea economically.

How Did We Get Here?

There are a number of reasons college debt has ballooned, and understanding them is key to determining how best to address the “problem.” The realities haven’t changed since Thomas Sowell wrote on these topics more than a decade ago.

First, there’s simply supply and demand. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment in all Title IV institutions, while down somewhat in the post-recession period (attributed to lower birth rates), is still up 36.3 percent from 1995 levels. Over the same period, the percentage of the population with a college degree has risen from 20.2 percent for women and 26 percent for men to 35.3 percent for women and 34.6 percent for men.

Today, nearly 70 percent of recent high school graduates are enrolled in college. Unsurprisingly, tuition and fees have skyrocketed. The powers that be have responded by throwing ever more money at the problem.

Unfortunately, that has only made the problem worse. As economists David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen Shen found, roughly 60 cents of every dollar in federal credit expansion for tuition goes only to increasing tuition. No wonder spending on higher education in the US already exceeds that of many countries with supposedly “free” college.

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In addition, there are already no less than 13 student loan forgiveness programs already in effect, most of which require nominal payments for 10 to 20 years before any balance is forgiven (a major disincentive to balance reduction). The New York Times recently provided a perfect example, citing the case of Samantha and Justin Morgan, who are on an “income-based” repayment plan and will see their loan balance continually rise until the balance is ultimately forgiven. You can’t significantly increase loan outlays, implement policies that hinder repayment, and then honestly act surprised that balances soar.

Who Reaps the Benefits?

Elizabeth Warren’s plan has been fairly described as a “bailout for the elite,” as the top 25 percent of households by income hold almost half of all student debt and as the cost would fall on all taxpayers when about two-thirds of American adults have no college degree, not to mention the 3-in-10 students who leave college debt-free (if you planned ahead or stepped up and paid your debt off, this scheme is a slap in the face).

But, as the Lucca-Nadlaud-Shen study makes clear, the real beneficiaries are the educational institutions that enjoy the benefit of more money being added to the system without a change in supply.  [read more]

Just another example of the Left playing Santa Clause and then the “presents” vaporize. They are conning the college students during and after college.

What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

From Minding the Campus.org (Sept. 4, 2018):

Universities in the 20^th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

All Cultures Are Equally Good; Diversity Is Our Strength

Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.

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The West Is Evil; The Rest Are Virtuous

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

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White Men Are Evil; Women of Color Are Virtuous

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

Individuals Are Not Important; Only Category Membership Is

Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category at equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.  [read more]

This is why the Left is insane and why they want to indoctrinate college students—insanity loves company. Also, why the far-Left wants free education.

The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?

From The Guardian (Mar. 25):

Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create “deepfakes for text”. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” they said, “we are not releasing the trained model.” Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?

……

Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – the machine continued the narrative as follows: “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.”

………….

Is there greater cause to worry further down the literary food chain? There have for a while already been “AI bots” that can, we hear, “write” news stories. All these are, though, are giant automated plagiarism machines that mash together bits of news stories written by human beings. As so often, what is promoted as a magical technological advance depends on appropriating the labour of humans, rendered invisible by AI rhetoric. When a human writer commits plagiarism, that is a serious matter. But when humans get together and write a computer program that commits plagiarism, that is progress.  [read more]

What would be eerie if robot writers could write like dead authors.

No One Is Coming to Rescue You—Especially Not a Presidential Candidate

From FEE.org:

Nearly every single person has an opinion about who this country should be supporting. And nearly every single one of them believes that their lives will be significantly better, or worse, based on who occupies the White House. But this gives politicians far too much power.

In order to truly better our lives, we need to rely less on political talking heads and more on ourselves. Only then can we begin to make a bigger difference and change the world.

Politicians Can’t Save You

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From a policy front, our lives change very little depending on who is the president. But there is a deeper issue here than one of just policy. In fact, it’s almost as if we view politicians as our personal saviors.

In Utah, when Mitt Romney was a 2012 Presidential candidate, many Utahns referred to him as the “white knight,” who had come to save our country and our Constitution. While this is the extreme of the cult of personality worship, it highlights the seriousness of the problem. The “white knight” reference implies that we need someone to come save us instead of realizing that we are capable of saving ourselves.

A politician cannot save us, not in the policy realm or our personal lives. But as individuals, we have nearly unlimited power to do this for ourselves.

We’ve Got to Save Ourselves

Objectivist and renowned American psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden cautions against waiting on someone else to come rescue you from your problems. In his book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Branden writes:

No one is coming to save me; no one is coming to make life right for me; no one is coming to solve my problems. If I don’t do something, nothing is going to get better.

At first glance, this might seem like a bleak statement. But in these words rests the immense personal power we need to transform our lives. No politician can save you, just like no parent or friend can save you. If you really want to fix your life and be a tool for change on a grander scale, you’re going to have to learn how to save yourself.

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During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson spoke of the importance of fixing your own life before you try to take on bigger tasks. He said:

…don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with that your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?

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Peterson’s sentiment actually echoes similar words written by Plato in a passage from The Republic, in which he writes:

But in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself.

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All You Can Do Is Start With Yourself

We would each do well to remind ourselves that an election season will not make or break us as individuals. Unless you are willing to take the steps needed to clean your room and be your own savior, you cannot expect someone else to do it for you. So instead of arguing back and forth on social media in favor of this or that candidate, do something that will help you change your own life and, thus, better prepare you to make bigger changes.

As Confucius says:

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

No one is coming to help you, so you might as well stop waiting and start fixing your own life today. [read more]

Good advice. I like the Confucius quote. So, true.

EXCLUSIVE: Who’s Bankrolling the National Popular Vote Movement

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 25):

The nonprofit organization building a coalition of states that favor choosing the president by popular vote promotes itself as nonpartisan, but is financed by millions of dollars from left-leaning groups.

Some of the leaders of the movement are prominent Republicans, and most of the funding for the nonprofit, National Popular Vote Inc., has come from a wealthy Democrat and a billionaire independent.

However, many large, liberal organizations back the movement, according to the Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank that monitors nonprofits. It gathered donor information on National Popular Vote Inc. using a commercial database.

The Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation, for example, gave $1 million to the nonprofit in 2011.

Jonathan Soros, 49, heads an investment firm and is the son of George Soros, a hedge fund manager known for financing left-leaning causes around the world. Although the Soros Foundation does not publicly list contact information, The Daily Signal sought comment through the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations. 

The Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation made donations totaling $1 million to National Popular Vote Inc. from 2008 to 2012, according to the most recent data. The Silberstein Foundation gave $350,000 in 2008, $250,000 in 2009, $250,000 in 2010, and $150,000 in 2012. The Daily Signal unsuccessfully sought comment from the Silberstein Foundation.  [read more]

Well, Soros is at it again. Doesn’t surprise me.

A Glimpse of What the Green New Deal Would Cost Taxpayers

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 25):

Implementing the Green New Deal resolution would place significant though hard-to-quantify costs on Americans, according to a preliminary analysis by The Heritage Foundation that hints at the total burden.

Granted, generating a cost estimate for a plan that is nebulously defined and lacks specificity is a challenge, especially when technologies to achieve those goals simply do not exist.

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It’s technically feasible to ground airplanes, close factories, and shut down oil pipelines. But that doesn’t mean an energy model can account for such a fantastical green dream.

Instead, to provide a broad estimate of just a fraction of what the Green New Deal would cost, Heritage analysts modeled implementation of a $54 carbon tax, phased in by 2021.

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To provide a glimpse into the broad costs on these industries, Heritage analysts implement an economy-wide carbon tax. In future analyses, we aim to implement higher carbon taxes to realize greater emissions reductions to the extent that the model recognizes such changes as technologically feasible.

1.4 Million Jobs Lost, $3.9 Trillion Hit to Economy

As mentioned in a FAQ sheet attributed to Ocasio-Cortez’s office, “a carbon tax would be a tiny part of a Green New Deal.” Nevertheless, modeling a “tiny part” and showing the high costs of that “tiny part” demonstrate just how economically devastating the Green New Deal would be.

Our tax begins in 2020 at $27 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, increases to $54 the following year, and subsequently increases annually by 2.5 percent. In our simulations, we rebate the revenue collected from the tax back to consumers.

In addition, we included carbon-based regulations on the manufacturing industry as well as mandates requiring the country to use significantly more renewable forms of energy than current projections. To quantify the economic impact of the Green New Deal, we used the Heritage Energy Model, a derivative of the Energy Information Administration’s National Energy Modeling System.

According to the Heritage Energy Model, as a result of the taxes and carbon-based regulations, by 2040 one can expect: 

• A peak employment shortfall of over 1.4 million jobs.
• A total income loss of more than $40,000 for a family of four.
• An aggregate gross domestic product loss of over $3.9 trillion.
• Increases in household electricity expenditures averaging approximately 12 to 14 percent.

Unquestionably, these projections from the Heritage Energy Model significantly underestimate the costs of the Green New Deal’s energy components. As Ocasio-Cortez’s Frequently Asked Questions sheet notes, the carbon tax is only one of many policy tools Green New Deal advocates hope to implement.

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Green New Deal Barely Would Affect Climate

Proponents of a carbon tax and the Green New Deal argue that these policies are a form of insurance against a changing climate. The cost of inaction, they purport, is much greater than any policies that drive energy prices higher.

However, the reality is these policies do not actually provide any “climate insurance.” No matter where one stands on the urgency to combat climate change, the Green New Deal policies would be ineffective in abating temperature increases and slowing the rise of sea levels. In fact, the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 100 percent and it would not make a difference in global warming. [read more]

Yes, just another gov’t take over of the economy.

More articles about the green new deal:

• Democrats Refuse to Vote for Green New Deal They Endorsed  Hypocrites!
• Green New Deal Would Reward Rich, Hurt Poor
• Puerto Rico Has Just Passed Its Own Green New Deal
• The Jevons Paradox and the Green New Deal
• Green Dreams

Were the Nazis Really Socialists? It Depends on How You Define Socialism

From FEE.org:

The Nazis didn’t call their ideology “national socialism” because they thought it sounded good. They were fervently opposed to capitalism. The Nazi Party’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, even once remarked that he’d sooner live under Bolshevism than capitalism. The Nazis instituted major public works projects such as the Autobahn, promised full employment, and dramatically increased government spending.

On the other hand, the Nazis were virulently anti-communist. That sentiment, along with German nationalism and anti-Semitism, was one of the main pillars of Nazism outlined by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Once in power, the Nazis supported and were supported by big business, and they even privatized a few government-operated services—all things that would make Karl Marx roll in his grave.

Evolving Definitions

So why, then, would the Nazis call themselves “socialists"? In part, it’s because the term “socialism” has been constantly evolving and changing since its inception. Some varieties of socialism bear no resemblance to the works of Karl Marx. According to The Counter-Revolution of Science, by Friedrich von Hayek, the term “socialism” was coined in the 1800s by French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed that industrialization and the Scientific Revolution called for a complete rearrangement of government and society.

Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon envisioned a totalitarian society ruled by a technocratic elite made up of industrialists, academics, businessmen, and scientists. Early socialists were primarily concerned with improving society through central organization and scientific discovery, and it wasn’t until Marx that socialism became associated with class struggle.

Marx derided these early socialists as “utopian socialists,” and, along with Friedrich Engels, he developed his own “scientific socialism.” Marx saw classes locked in a perpetual struggle for material resources and believed that capitalism would inevitably lead to a global revolution of workers against the bourgeoisie. The victorious proletariat would then establish a communist society where there were no classes and communal ownership of the means of production. Marxist-Leninists came to more narrowly define “socialism” to mean the intermediary period between capitalism and communism where the state owned the means of production and centrally managed the economy.

In establishing national socialism, the Nazis sought to redefine socialism yet again. National socialism began as a fusion of socialist ideas of a technocratically-managed economy with Völkisch nationalism, a deeply anti-Semitic form of German nationalism. In their burgeoning ideology, the Nazis saw both capitalism and communism as unhealthily materialistic and based in selfishness rather than national unity, traits they negatively associated with Judaism. Oswald Spengler, one of the main intellectual influences of Nazism, went so far as to call Marxism “the capitalism of the working class.” The Nazis’ redefinition of socialism was realized through the Völksgemeinschaft, which served as a means of connecting the individual to the state.

The Nazis Weren't Strictly Socialist

While the Nazis were disdainful of capitalism, this disdain did not extend to capitalists themselves. Class conflict figured little into the Nazi conception of socialism, with the exception of the party’s Strasserist faction, which was purged during the Night of the Long Knives. Instead, Nazis considered both capitalists and workers necessary, occupying their own important roles within the Völksgemeinschaft. The Nazis also distinguished themselves from Marxists in their support for private property, although this came with some caveats.

The Nazi government did not own the means of production in Germany, but they certainly controlled them. They set up control boards, cartels, and state-sponsored monopolies and konzerns, which they then carefully planned and regulated. Industrial leaders hardly objected. In surrendering control of their enterprises to the state, they insulated themselves from market forces, ensuring they’d remain at the top of their respective industries.

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Unlike Marxists, democratic socialists don’t believe in total government ownership of the means of production, nor do they wish to technocratically manage the economy as the Nazis did. Instead, according to the Democratic Socialists of America, they “believe that workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.”

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Solutions

The wide variance between utopian socialism, communism, national socialism, and democratic socialism makes it remarkably easy for members of each ideology to wag their fingers at the others and say, “That wasn’t real socialism.” However, there is one common thread in each of these definitions of socialism. From Saint-Simon to AOC, all self-described socialists have shared the belief that top-down answers to society’s problems are superior to the bottom-up answers created by the free market. [read more]

   

The differences in socialisms is like the differences in poisons. Different poisons have different chemical compositions, and different symptoms. Some may kill you quicker. But the end result is the same: Death. To paraphrase Shakespeare, socialism by any other name is still socialism.

It’s all about power—how to hold on to it and increase it.