Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

Matt Whitlock presents us evidence that USA Today is playing fast and loose with their own record of events.

You see despite MLB bragging how many minutes of games being streamed the decision to pull the All Star Game has not only proved embarrassing for them but has proved damaging to both Stacy Abrams in Georgia and to the Biden administration so it became necessary to change the record of what was said to deflect blame from Abrams, and the Biden Administration in general and Democrats in particular.

Not only did USA today retroactively edit Stacy Abrams published op-ed but after said op-ed was edited the media used the edited op-ed to claim that her position on the Georgia boycott and moving the the MLB All Star game was not .

“Twitter gave it an entire trending blurb, CITING the op-Ed she had edited after the MLB move to cement the narrative that the MLB move wasn’t her fault. That’s some Orwellian stuff,” Whitlock wrote on Saturday.

Furthermore they didn’t bother noting adding a disclaimer that the piece had been updated until days after they were called out on it.

If this all sounds familiar to you then you must be a fan of the TV series Yes Prime Minister when the PM and Sir Humphrey found it necessary for political reasons to redo the record to fend off a supposed leadership challenge. The scene and the reaction appears below:

Prime Minister James Hacker: [Cabinet Enters] Ah Gentlemen please be seated Now you’ve all have a copy of the agenda. Item one minutes of the last meeting.

Employment Secretary Dudley: Prime Minister excuse me a point of order, I see that my plans for defense establishment relocation is not on the agenda.

PM Hacker: That is correct Dudley yes.

Dudley: Well Why not?

PM Hacker: It’s all this leaking that’s been going on. It’s making a very damaging row in the press. I can’t allow the cabinet to seem divided.

Dudley: It is divided.

PM Hacker: Yes that’s why it mustn’t look it. It’s a very complex issue and I’ve decided to defer all further discussion to a later date.

Dudley: I can’t understand it you were in favor of it last time?

PM Hacker: No I wasn’t.

Dudley: Yes You were, and so was everyone else expect the Secretary of State for Defense.

PM Hacker: No they weren’t.

Dudley: Yes they were and you promised a further discussion.

PM Hacker: Ahem…

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I’m sorry to interrupt but I think not.

Dudley: What?

Sir Humphrey: There was no such promise, And the Prime Minister did not support the proposal because if he had it would have appeared in the minutes, and it doesn’t.

Dudley: Doesn’t it? Prime Minister why was my request for a further discussion and your reply not minuted?

PM Hacker: I ah…

Sir Humphrey: [interrupting] It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and it isn’t, so it wasn’t.

PM Hacker: Told you so.

Yes Prime Minister Yes Prime Minister Man Overboard 1987:

Alas for USA today and the left unlike Sir Humphrey and PM Hacker we now live in an internet age when screen shots are routinely taken of such articles and that it takes but a single person to note a difference and communicate their discovery via DM/Tweet/Post or email for those who have taken said shot to compare and if their own screenshot doesn’t exist there is always the Wayback machine (at least until someone starts edition those results).

I’m sure the media and the pols they protect miss those days and it makes one wonder how many “official” archives have been so “corrected” over the years before the current scrutiny became the norm?

Some polling is out on the Biden Admin and it’s kinda meh.

I find it really funny to be so when you consider:

1. A media that has spent the last 100 days propping it up.
2. Tech giants that have suppressed contrary voices.
3. And Polling who routinely bend polling to favor dems.

Yet despite all this the Biden admin polls: meh!

I wonder how bad the real numbers would be if they generated real numbers, but then again when you have an admin that doesn’t rely on actual votes to gain power you don’t have to worry about pols do you?

There is a rather excellent piece at the Powerline Blog about the reasons why Green energy is doomed to fail. The bottom line in his piece is land use and the infrastructure to bring the energy from where it is generated to the NIMBY folk who want the energy but not the infrastructure is dramatic to say the least.

When “green” advocates tabulate the costs of wind and solar energy, they generally don’t include the thousands of miles of transmission lines that are required to bring electricity from the rural areas that are stuck with “green” development to the urban areas where the electricity is used. But such transmission lines represent a huge economic and environmental issue:

Connecting lots of wind and solar to the grid also requires appropriating land for transmission projects. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, converting the domestic electric grid to run on renewables will require roughly doubling the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity in the U.S. At present, the U.S. has about 240,000 miles of high-voltage transmission. Therefore, renewables conversion means adding enough high-voltage transmission lines to circle the Earth about 10 times.

The piece and the report it cites is excellent however there is one glaring error that I would like to point out and it’s an error in terms of premise.

The premise of the piece is that green energy is “doomed to failure” however that is incorrect. Not because it won’t provide the energy needs it claims, it won’t but because the goal of green energy is not to provide energy but to provide cash, from the piece:

So why does the “green dream” persist? In part, because it is inflicted on children from elementary school on. But mostly because there is a great deal of money in it. This chart shows the volume of U.S. tax incentives per unit of energy produced for various energy sources:

“Green” energy holds political sway, which has made a relative handful of people (largely non-Americans and lobbyists) immensely wealthy, while impoverishing utility rate payers and taxpayers–that is to say, the rest of us. 

“Green” energy is all about the green that is all about the green that lobbyists can get from US taxpayers for their clients and the political kickbacks in terms of both contributions and jobs for the connected and their families in these industries all paid for by you.

If you remember that this is the actual goal, to grease the connected at the taxpayer expense rather than produce clean power for the public then Green energy not only hasn’t failed but it has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.