Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?

Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.

And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.

Point, free market!

That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.

Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.

Spoiler alert: the endgame of the "electric vehicle revolution" is NOT the same number of people driving around, except using EVs instead of gas-fueled cars. The endgame is sharply restricting or eliminating personal transportation for the middle and lower classes.

— John Hayward (@Cobretata) December 1, 2022

We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.

Electric cars – What could go wrong??? Switzerland will BAN electric cars from roads during power shortages
https://t.co/pfUOVbNh1o

— Tom Borelli, Ph.D. (@tomborelli) December 2, 2022

Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.

Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.

(more…)

If proclamations made with muted, Minnesotan gusto were correlated with economic results, Jacob Frey’s exhortations would have downtown Minneapolis humming along like Dallas.

Alas, they do not. Some of downtown’s signature office towers are ailing financially:

 The 30-story LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled to go to auction next week after the previous owner, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois, avoided foreclosure by transferring the building to its lender, Northwest Mutual.

Nearby Fifth Street Towers is facing the same fate and may also go back to its lender this month, according to Axios’ sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.

And it’s not just your garden-variety class-AAAAA office space. It’s the big daddy of all the downtown office buildings (emphasis added):

Real estate analytics firm Trepp is keeping tabs on IDS Center — the city’s most iconic office tower — due to a 77% occupancy rate and the loss of Nordstrom Rack from Crystal Court, said senior managing director Manus Clancy

Rumors of downtown’s non-demise appear to be premature.

I know a few people with contacts in the Chinese diasporic and dissident communities. They’ve been telling me for the past few years – even before the pandemic – to watch out for what’s going on in China.

To Americans inured to rioting in Minneapolis and Portland, the news of riots in Shanghai, not long after rioting in formerly-free Hong King, might elicit an ignorant shrug.

So it may not be immediately apparent how striking it is to see scenes like this in China: a man, yelling “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (at 3:08), is dragged away by police and militia…

…and then dragged back by the passersby.

Chinese subjects, forcefully re-capturing someone arrested by the cops.

That’s a little like the famous Tienanmen Square guy putting down his groceries, pulling a Molotov Cocktail out of the bag, and setting the tank on fire.

Lest you feel too happy, it gets much worse.

Around 7:15, the story follows a fire call at a large apartment in Xinjiang. Firemen have a hard time reaching the building at all, due to Covid lockdown restrictions. Since the building is locked down, the fire escapes are locked shut – and the death toll was horrific (as the cell phone conversation captured around 7:30 shows).

Around 8:35: residents unblock a neighborhood that had been sealed off for over three months, and send the police running.

I know – don’t give Tim Walz any ideas, right?

But the people were not amused.

Various whispers from the dissident community – which you can credit or not, as the attribution is pretty much all underground – is that a whooole lot of Chinese students and emigres are the children of party members who are trying to get their families ensconced somewhere safe before things blow up. Whether that’s wishful thinking or prescience, time will tell.

On the one hand, totalitarian dictators are generally very good at seeing to their own survival (until they’re not).

On the other? In 1980, the record shows Ronald Reagan was just about the only person who could see the USSR collapsing. In historical scale, it all happened so quickly after that – almost too quickly for the left to claim they’d predicted it all along.

Is China the same?

More on this in the future.

As the late Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards said, there are two Americas.

Both of them might look at this video, of Chinese cops searching peoples cell phones for signs of anti-regime badthink.

Shanghai police grabbing, checking phones up and down the subway pic.twitter.com/dvVZRzJ1tW

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 29, 2022

One America thinks “get a warrant, bitch”.

The other America gets a tingle down its leg and thinks “imagine what we could do for vaccine, mask and distancing compliance!”

That second America is the one that’s nattering at the first America about “democracy”.