Residential Electricity Prices In The US

 

She Bought An EV

Generally, when one asks a car owner how they feel about their transportation the answer is a positive one. Nobody likes to admit that they have made a mistake on a purchase as expensive as an automobile. The longer the conversation goes on, the more likely it is that the car owner will reveal some of the negative issues about the vehicle.

Here is an interesting article by a young lady in Vancouver, B.C. that describes some of her problems as an EV driver. 

 

Akiko Hara 

Reparations

The subject of reparations has reverberated through the US to the extent that actual votes have been taken by an appointed panel on it in California. The reparations discussed are to be made to descendants of African slaves captured and shipped to North America whose labor enriched their white owners. Details of the California vote are described here.

Most interesting is the fact that the majority of those purchased in Africa and sent by ship to the New World were captured and sold by other Africans, who were willing participants in the process. The centers of this business were on the West African coast. The most powerful tribes used their power to dominate the supply of slaves to Portuguese, Dutch, and British traders. One of those tribes was the Fante, of what was then known as the Gold Coast and is called Ghana today. 

The Fante were then and now the premier tribal power in that area. While no records exist of the day-to-day activities from the Fante perspective, there's no doubt that the Fante controlled the local slave trade just as they controlled other financial activities. Yet the idea of reparations doesn't seem to include the group that actually made the transactions work. In fact, one of the modern Fantes was the celebrated Kofi Annan, appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1996.

If any reparations are to be made to the descendants of Africans captured and sold into North American slavery, the descendants of their captors and sellers should certainly be responsible for a significant portion of those reparations. 

Curiosity

From Fresh Air Fiend, a collection of essays and articles by Paul Theroux, this quote is from The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad.

"Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remain always partly mysterious."   

Collectivism In The US

If the public pronouncements of elected national leaders and their hired help mean anything it's that the US is slithering toward a neo-Soviet society. 

The latest examples of this are statements by POTUS Joe Biden and his incompetent spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre. 

On April 23, at a White House ceremony honoring teachers of the year, the man with the codes that open the nuclear "football" said this:  “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child,” Biden said. “No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.”

Later, on May 13, at a festival organized by the  Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in New York at the Hilton Midtown, the inept and confused Biden press mouthpiece said: "I’ve met a lot of parents of trans kids in the past couple of months who have told me these devastating stories, whether they’re in Texas or Oklahoma or wherever they are, saying how they now have to seriously consider leaving their state to protect their child. That’s something that we have to call out and continue to be very clear about. These are kids. These are our kids. They belong to all of us."

The collectivization of the US has been a work-in-progress for perhaps its entire existence. Following the Revolutionary War, or what should be known as another battle in the War of the Three Kingdoms, the geographic expansion of the US resulted in a nascent empire where, just as in the case of the Soviet empire, all the land newly stolen from the inhabitants became a collective property of the original thirteen colonies, now states. As time went by some of that land was sold or transferred to private interests but huge portions of it remain in the federal portfolio. As statehood was granted to US territories, the new states received allotments of property but the largest land owner today is still the federal government, an essential quality of the Soviet system. Subordinate governments, state, county, city and township, holding title to significant portions of the landscape, regulate its dispersal and use in a manner no different in essence than the Russian collectivist experiment.

The US is generally portrayed as having a free market capitalist economy. This is certainly not true in the early years of the 21st century, if it ever was. Now, instead of allowing businesses to sink or swim by their own efforts, the federal establishment decides which will succeed or fail according to its own preferences. At the moment, billions of dollars are being showered on the computer chip industry, already one of the more successful endeavors on earth. Billions more are being transferred to a corrupt Ukrainian regime that is a decaying vestige of the Russian empire it now fights. 

These malinvestments, and many more, will be the financial millstone on the neck of a US population that no longer produces enough real wealth to justify the enpixelation of trillions of invisible, abstract dollars. Companies that create tangible assets, oil companies, lumber companies, electrical utilities and manufacturers are hamstrung by  increasing and contradictory government policies. This causes them to inevitably jump in bed with the government, managers on both sides of the public/private sphere switching allegiances back and forth. 

Whatever may have been the original spark that kicked over the US engine, it has now been smothered by the Neo-Soviet, central planning fiasco.  

 

 

The Great Coronation

 tvinsider.com

The New King and Queen

The folderol over the ascension of Charles III to the kingship of Britain seems to have captivated much of the English-speaking world. Although the new king, consort and their country are but an antique anachronism, as can be seen by their costumes, that might very well be the reason that their silly deeds and ceremonies are fodder for the media. They are of no consequence. They can't even be disliked for the oppressive colonial policies that their distant forebears helped enforce. The most significant  emotion toward them might be envy since it's felt that they do no work, travel frequently and spend much of their time at baronial castles on their  thousands of acres of royal property. Rather than being genuine government figures they, and their extended families, are instead full-time actors in an international soap opera. There's no reason to care about the trials and tribulations of Meghan and Harry other than a lack of meaning in one's own life or a misguided voyeurism.

And those distant forebears: the father of Charles III was a member of the Greek royal family and his mother, Queen Elizabeth, was a descendant of the German Hanovers. These people are all members of an hereditary ruling class that inter-married and inspired revolutions all over Europe. It's fine if the British themselves wish to coddle these parasites but idiotic for Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and citizens of other minor colonial outposts to pay any attention to them. Significantly there's no love for them in the Irish republic.

Perhaps not so oddly, we don't know much about the families of the movers and shakers in the rest of the world unless they're particularly flamboyant in the most evil senses. See Kim Jong Un and his sister Kim Yong Jun, of North Korea, and Xi Jinping, Chinese boss. The details of the peccadilloes of their daily lives, their romantic attachments and those of their associates aren't of interest to the public, even though, unlike the Brit royals, they have the wherewithal to exterminate much of life on earth. Wouldn't it be interesting to know who Kim Yong Jun is holding hands with?