Pagans Blowing It...

When Windmills Don’t Spin, People Expect Some Answers

Turbines, more than 100 feet tall, were installed last year in 11 Minnesota cities to provide power, and also to serve as educational symbols in a state that has mandated that a quarter of its electricity come from renewable resources by 2025.

One problem, though: The windmills, supposed to go online this winter, mostly just sat still, people in cities like North St. Paul and Chaska said, rarely if ever budging. Residents took note. Schoolchildren asked questions. Complaints accumulated.

Hah!

Well, the first thing I'd do if my windmill stopped spinning....is to check and make sure it was plugged in properly!

Hey, as least this article had to stones (or oversight!) to call them what they were *symbols* - even if the modifier ought to be changed from educational to *pagan*.

And I must say, I was surprised to see this article in the NYT. In the *old days*, they'd never slip up like this!

See also - Green Infighting And More On Bird-Blenders

An Eco-Pagan Discount?

Look at that ↑

3,206 square feet, curb appeal, in a tony town, and a very young (for New England) 19 years old!

It started last year somewhere north of $800,000 - either 825k or 850k. I can't remember. My wife checked it out and really liked it, notwithstanding the price of course.

Here's the listing today:

VALUE RANGE PRICING- Sellers will entertain offers between 700,000-749,900. Well maintained home nestled in a sought after neighborhood, close to village, ballfields and beaches. Private backyard, abuts conservation land-bird sanctuary. This home has had many rooms freshly painted, Glistening hardwood floors, granite kitchen, renovated half bath, new gym or office in lower lever. New boiler as well as two decks, with custom mahogany railings, all make this home ready to move right in.

Okay, what the bleep does *entertain offers between 700,00 - 749,900* mean???

I've seen that nonsense a few times on Coldwell Banker properties. Why exactly would any Moron bid over $700,000 given that stipulation. (My wife and I have mind to bid them 595k!)

Let's see, the house has been sitting there since last year....so I'm not sure *entertain* is a well-chosen verb either. They must be pissed; I've seen plenty of worse looking homes sell, at higher relative prices to boot(!), in this region during the knife-catching, low-interest-rate-mirage, year of 2009. It's probably one of these situations where the house has been just a little (50k?) over-priced, the whole way down. Much like that one we bid on!

Another hypothesis, of which I'm skeptical, is that maybe all the potential buyers somehow found out that this house will be in the shadow of a soon-to-be-built, ginormous, eco-pagan windmill?

Yes indeed. The locals were vociferous, and evenly-split on the issue - at least until the dark side called a *midnight meeting* during a quiet summer week....and rammed the controversial proposal through.

One interesting thing about that battle was that, supposedly (because I won't get personally involved in this crap), there was a strict age divide. All the 'old coots' and 'old bags' in town were FOR a spinning, symbolic waste of tax dollars. And standing opposed were the younger families - the people who hadn't been voting for Ted Kennedy for the past 46 years.

Birth Of Another Lobby - Big Alternative Energy

Environmentalists Celebrate Big Wins In Massachusetts

So who was the biggest winner on Beacon Hill this session: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick? House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi? Gay marriage activists?

Guess again.

Tally up the crush of bills passed during the Legislature's 19-month formal session and it's hard to find a politician or interest group with bigger bragging rights than environmentalists.

From ocean management to global warming, "green jobs" to clean energy, the environmental lobby racked up win after win at the Statehouse, helped along by a sympathetic governor, powerful House speaker and worries about soaring energy prices and the state's iffy economy.

Activists hope the successes not only burnish the state's reputation as a green leader, but pay long-term dividends, from preserving open spaces to reversing the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"It's been the greatest session in recent history," said Jennifer Ryan, Mass. Audubon's Legislative Director.

Greg Mankiw - Time To Update Your Agitprop

National retail gasoline prices hit $4 per gallon this week - an all-time high. Please excuse the non-updated chart above. Just imagine how high the $4 data point would be.

Flashback to October 2006 when that buffoon Greg Mankiw leaped to the front of the Moron Universe with his Pigou Manifesto. If you don't remember, in it he advocated a new $1 per gallon gasoline tax that would be quite the panacea.

It would ease congestion, save this over-heated planet, improve national security, help balance the budget, and effect a couple of other, loopy, theoretical, unquantifiable pipe dreams (e.g "regulatory relief", "tax incidence", and promote "economic growth").

I worked him over good in Dr. Greg Mankiw, The Harvard Economist, Marginalizing Himself.



And then I decapitated him in Greg Mankiw Swings and Misses when he made the cardinal sin of altercating with me personally.

Well Greg, gasoline was around $2.60 back then so we've gotten your prescribed $1 increase plus another 40%!!!!

Yet roads are still congested, planet Earth is still doomed, and his other fancies (like "economic growth") remain as laughable as ever.

Hey, at least he wasn't as stupid as the New York Times which specified an absolute dollar price, $3.00 per gallon, that would usher in a terror-free, cool-Earth utopia.

And, of course, when gas was $1 a gallon, these clowns were probably all saying that a 50 cent tax would be all that's needed to get the science fictional alternative energies going!

Marginalizing Upwind Peeing Pagans

I know a guy who's, well, an environmental wacko. I forget how it came up, but one day he started going off on cell phone chargers. He got all hot and bothered about how people leave their cell phone on the charger and plugged in long after the charging is complete.

This guy is such, like, a total DOUBLE LOSER.

By no means was this a personal crusade. I right away found the issue on TreeHugger.com. None of these clowns think for themselves.

Apparently, phone chargers burn electricity even when there is no phone plugged into them. So exactly how much electricity, if I may to ask the obvious, germane question?

Well, you had to get far down the comment thread to find out, after one brave soul tested his charger with a Kill-O-Watt meter, that over the course of a year, his particular charger burned 1.1 KWh.

So that's around 14 whopping cents - for the entire year!!!

Note this DOUBLE LOSER has a PhD from one of the top five universities in the country.



It's been fun recently breaking balls on composting. The idea has been around for quite a freakin' long time. As such, anyone jumping out of their seat to buy a composter at Costco today is a certifiable, docile Moron. It's a fad for crying out loud - as very well proven by them selling at big box retailers.

It reminds me of the Atkins diet at its peak in January 2004. When many of my MOST DUMBEST friends/family members pig-piled into the decades-old idea of carb reduction I knew the mania was over.

By the way, that composter above retails for about $500 - more proof that a justice-rendering, fool-impoverishing God exists!

What did y'all do with your egg shells and coffee grounds this morning anyway, you Earth-rapers?!?!?!



One of my new favorite shows is Hell's Kitchen. Despite the ridiculous volume of profanity and ugliest cast in the history of television, the show is a compelling watch. Anyone who cooks or eats out (everyone?) might be interested in seeing how a restaurant kitchen functions behind the scenes. (Yes germaphobes, they are constantly sticking their fingers in your food to test for doneness and proper seasoning!)

Gordon Ramsay is a famously successful restaurateur in Great Britain ($60 entrees?) - but like any specialized ego-maniac, he thinks his intelligence transfers smoothly into all other fields. He's now calling for banning restaurants from using vegetables that are "out of season" and have to be trafficked half-way around the world. "Buy local" is his preachy platitude presumably to save the planet from burning fossil fuels.

Mr Ramsay said in a radio interview: "There should be stringent laws - licensing laws - to make sure produce is only used in season.

"The quicker we get legislation pushed through the Houses of Parliament, the more unique this country will become in terms of its sourcing and level of inspiration.

"Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they haven't got ingredients in season on the menu."

Yeah Gordon that's a great idea! Go shut off the richest markets on this over-heated planet to impoverished Third World farmers. He's a real world-saver!

This sort of reminds me of the nearby Hull windmill:



Hull is a tiny beach town up the road from me (1.5 miles) that has a very low socio-economic status (average household income $58,136); it's quite rough if you what I mean. However it happened, the eco-pagan elites got Hull-ites to sully their skyline with a couple of hideous windmills. They are an absolute eyesore. I brand anyone that claims otherwise an Automatic Moron. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and other "do as I say, not as I do" wealthy Earth-copulators have been able to keep wind turbines away from their pristine horizon in Martha's Vineyard.

Note the full-court brainwashing going on in Hull:

Hull has been "a model for engaging the entire community to understand and move forward together on its wind power project, from school teachers, utility engineers and local leaders to state government, academia and industry".

I found that on a website "not affiliated with Hull", powered by CARE (Citizens for Alternative Renewable Energy). The addresses I found for CARE were Greenwich, CT and Washington DC. Thank you citizens elitists!

I wish some of the crunchy trust funded tools in Cambridge would saunter into Hull one night and start barroom discussions of renewable energy, climate change, and sustainablity. If they did, they'd probably be going home minus a few teeth to say the least.



Unplugging cell phone chargers, composting 8 egg shells a week, and providing *sustainable* electricity for a fraction of one town's mere 11,000 residents....

...it's like peeing upwind(!) on a forest fire.

UPDATE - Here's an email on this subject I received from a reader:

Hi C:

I just read your blog post about the Hull windmill. I previously audited a Nebraska electrical company's books (during my CPA days) and asked about the 2 windmills near Lincoln, the state capitol. The employee said that if the taxpayers (it was a public utility) knew about how many $$ the windmills lost, they would be outraged.

Pluming Prius Putzes

Read these holier-than-thou license plates.






























Virtue may be its own reward -- but as any self-respecting Prius Progressive can attest, the payoffs of hybrid ownership don't stop there. Beyond the gas pump savings, the tax breaks, the entree to carpool lanes, the freedom to park without feeding meters and the aura of cool kinship with Hollywood hybriders such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, comes something more visceral.

Say what? Prius drivers don't have to feed the parking meters? Are you freakin' kidding me?

Read more here.

Naples Real Estate Update

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Naples/Fort Myers area of Florida is currently the foreclosure epicenter of the nation. Here's the text of an email my real estate guy from down there just sent me:

FYI, BAC owns 12 properties in Naples..Countrywide 15.

In Lee County BAC owns 66...Countrywide 17.

Citibank 9 and 20. I thought citi was the biggest dummy. Let's see how this plays out...

The important point to take from this anecdotage may be what it reveals about Bank of America.

Supposedly, according to Wall Street wisdom, Ken Lewis and Co. have the lowest exposure to the housing bust. But as you can see, they are already extremely competitive with Countrywide when it comes to bad lending in this particular region.

So maybe BAC has more bad mortgage debt than everyone thinks. I remember getting essentially attacked by a BAC branch loan officer in Charlotte after merely glancing at their posted mortgage rates, "ARE YOU BUYING A HOUSE??? DO YOU NEED A MORTGAGE???" They certainly seemed like aggressive lenders to me. Furthermore, these existing losses beg the question of why the heck do they want to pile on more via the Countrywide acquisition. As I type this CFC shares are down to a scant $4.36 per share. I still maintain that despite the density and ego of its chairman Ken Lewis, there's still a chance that BoA bails out of its Countrywide bid. (Elevated option premiums are suggesting uncertainty as well.)

My Naples real estate guy also sent me this item:



It's a 10,000 square foot mansion in Naples that is currently owned by, you guessed it, the Bank of America.

So long as they hold this foreclosed property, they'll be on the hook for $65,000 in annual taxes and $7,200 in HOA fees - those losses, of course, fall on top of the bath they likely took on the failed loan. For the moment, you can click here to see the full house details.

Maybe BoA is stumbling because their management has other non-financial priorities?

Bank Of America CEO: Carbon Emissions Need Cap-And-Trade System


RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)--Private investors alone can't spur an environmentally friendly "green economy," Bank of America Corp. (BAC) Chief Executive Ken Lewis said Tuesday, as he called on Congress to create a cap-and-trade system to help control carbon emissions.

Such a cap-and-trade system would allow businesses to buy and sell emissions credits - selling extra allowances if they come in under a carbon-emission quota, and buying them if exceed the cap. It was one of several suggestions Lewis made to policy makers in a speech at the Institute for Emerging Issues forum, held at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

"We favor a market-based mechanism to set a value for carbon allowances, and a clear, federal standard that would give investors the certainty they need to plan for the future," Lewis said.

The two-day conference, attended by General Electric Co. (GE) Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Immelt and Duke Energy Corp. (DUK) CEO Jim Rogers, among others, focused on the development of alternative fuels and conservation efforts that will create jobs and reduce the pollution blamed for global warming.

"Like any large, important, transformative project, this one is going to require a lot of money," Lewis said. "I'm guessing that's why you invited me."

Along with the cap-and-trade system, Lewis said policy makers must determine what kind of environmental incentives and regulations work best at the state level, which would help avoid a patchwork of inconsistent regulation. The private capital market also needs "a stable and predictable regulatory environment with a bias toward clean energy and the green economy," he said.

Last March, Bank of America launched a $20 billion initiative to help its customers support the growth of environmentally friendly activities and to reduce global warming. On Tuesday, he said Bank of America had created a team whose sole focus will be to identify and finance projects that support a green economy and address the nation's environmental challenges.

"There are a lot of great ideas out there," Lewis said. "This fact creates a huge risk-management challenge for banks...as a financial backer of new technologies, the bank is in the position of picking winners and losers."



Well now Kenny, isn't it the free markets that actually pick "winners and losers".

Aren't you learning that down in Southwest Florida?

If you haven't already, visit my oft-hit post Bank Of America's Ken Lewis - Socialist Hero, Shareholder Villain.