progressivism – BALAFON

Thinking Without a License is Prohibited

This story pretty much epitomizes the end result of statism. When you allow, and then expect, the government to take care of you, the government will inevitably criminalize taking care of yourself (emphasis mine):

David N. Cox says he was merely exercising his right to petition the government, but a state Department of Transportation official has raised allegations that Cox committed a misdemeanor: practicing engineering without a license.

David N. Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.

After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners’ Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own.

…

Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But [chief traffic engineer] Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

We’re from the government, and we know better than you.

Human Achievement Hour

Since my lights are powered by nuclear fusion¹, I will not be turning them off tomorrow night.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

The sun heats up the ocean, whence water vapor forms clouds, which precipitate rain onto the mountains, which runs into a turbine and powers my lights. ↩

Progressivism as a fundamentalist religion redux

Plans to build a large solar electricity plant in the California desert have been cancelled because of opposition.

By environmentalists.

Evidently they are not actually interested in renewable electricity. They just want us to freeze in the dark.

Religious Double Standard

Turns out there’s still at least one religion whose priests can sodomize children and be excused and even applauded.

The religion I speak of is, of course, Progressivism, whose self-appointed high priests are the glitterati of Hollywood. Roman Polanski, a genius at film directing, admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, and then fled the country. Now his extradition to the US is being protested by a large number of hollywood celebrities. (Thankfully there are some, both celebrities and non, who are rightly appalled by this.)

It’s a little ironic, don’t you think, that in this day and age a high-status male can sexually assault a child and be excused and applauded. How very . . . patriarchal.