Modern Environmentalism
Cut down healthy trees to build a giant wind farm
Ladies and gentlemen of the Properly Subversive persuasion, it is official. We can now say with 100 percent confidence that modern environmentalism has officially jumped the shark. Phooey on John Muir, screw Henry David Thoreau and the horse Edward Abbey rode in on. They are old fart preservationists who never quite understood the higher meaning of real environmentalism.
Make room for the proud new Greenies. In Scotland, it’s the uber left Scottish National Party, which has decided to cut down 17 million healthy trees to put up giant windmill farms.
David Blackmon offers this lament:
This obsession with destroying whatever scenic or arable lands necessary to put up ugly, intermittent, unreliable, and hugely costly developments of dozens of gigantic wind towers with less than a 20% efficiency rate is what has replaced the “environmental” movement in the Western world today.
It is one of the saddest and most ruinous social developments in modern times, and it simply must be stopped.
One of the wind farms is planned next to the Royal Family’s estate at Balmoral. Americans will know the place from the series The Crown. It is shown many times over multiple seasons. See it below. Imagine windmills lining the ridgeline.
The Scottish Daily Press reports 16 massive turbines, twice the height of Big Ben, will be erected 33 miles from castle and in that famous countryside.
I always believed environmentalism had something to do with preserving the environment. I am so unwoke.
Verdict Time
The trial in New York City against Donald Trump comes down to the nub this week. Byron York’s piece in the Washington Examiner sheds light on what’s at stake:
On Tuesday, a jury in Manhattan will hear closing arguments in the trial of former President Donald Trump. Local prosecutors allege Trump committed bookkeeping offenses as part of a conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. The former president’s specific crime, prosecutors say, was labeling a nondisclosure agreement negotiated by his lawyer as a “legal expense” in Trump Organization books.
But bookkeeping offenses, even when done by Trump, are misdemeanors in New York, so prosecutors sought to raise the seriousness of the charge by alleging an additional crime. They haven’t said so precisely, but in court papers, they have offered a “theory” in which Trump, in addition to the bookkeeping, violated a New York state election law barring the “conspiracy to promote or prevent election … by unlawful means.” That is also a misdemeanor, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argues that the two misdemeanors, when taken together, add up to 34 felony charges and a maximum sentence of 136 years in prison for Trump. Such is the state of the justice system in New York.
It doesn’t take a brilliant legal mind to see that it all depends — Trump’s future and the hopes of Democrats who seek to jail him and cripple his presidential candidacy — it all depends on that second misdemeanor, which the attorneys usually refer to as the “object crime.” So it is not surprising that there has been furious debate between the two sides about how Judge Juan Merchan will instruct the jury to consider the object crime when they decide Trump’s fate.
Covering SCOTUS
A hot topic in journalism today is how to cover Supreme Court justices — like politicians or like interpreters of the law? Here’s a good piece from Semafor to get the juices flowing. And, here’s an excerpt on the premise:
Coverage of the Supreme Court can be divided into pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs — or, more specifically, into the period before and after May 2022, when Politico published a leaked draft of the decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade’s federal protection of the right to an abortion. The leak and its aftermath exposed the court’s internal politics and further damaged its carefully-cultivated reputation as an institution above the partisan fray.
The ruling also played into a long-running argument among journalists: Should justices be covered as politicians appointed to powerful roles? Or should they be seen as a class apart — jurists covered for their ideas, rather than their personalities or interests?
Enjoy. Worth thinking about. My bet: You are going to see more pieces on conservative judges playing politics.
‘Furiosa!’
The Mad Max prequel Furiosa is predicted to do $31 million over the Memorial Day Weekend. It’s the lowest grossing chart topper over Memorial Day since Casper in 1995. I can’t say anything about Casper since I didn’t see it. But, I did see Furiosa … and I enjoyed it. I like the franchise, especially the haunting first one with Mel Gibson and the 2015 one with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.
Thanks for reading. Remember to laugh a little, avoid soreheads and always question authority. Thank you for subscribing. You can also follow me on Facebook and X.
One More Thing
