Please don't get the impression that this bullshit is MAGA.
I'm white, and if you find yourself squared off against assholes who think like this...
Me and mine will be beside you.
Fuck the commie propaganda that would divide us.
We are a nation of ideas and principles, not genetics, and anyone who would try to convince you otherwise is attempting to destroy that nation.
Don't forget slaves.
We all have slaves in our family trees.
It was the rule of the world for millennia.
Until white people decided maybe it wasn't a great idea.
That's a fact that gets conveniently left out of most "history" these days.
Truth.
Those commie scum are absolutely doing exactly that.
BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BAIT YOU INTO PANTS-ON-HEAD-RETARDEDNESS.
Don't fall for it.
Call them out on their race baiting bullshit. But don't dive into the slop with them!
The culture that destroyed Baltimore is nearly unrelated to African culture.
It does have a common thread with African culture, however.
It's the very tribalism that this post advocates. You morons.
When you allow propaganda to convince you that a whole class or race of people is your enemy...
You create that tribalism. And it is the most destructive force imaginable against the rationality that is western culture.
Western culture comes from Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Scandinavians, etc...
Do you think they all felt racially united? Hell no.
But, after centuries of tribal warfare, those disparate groups eventually came to the conclusion that murdering each other over differences of opinion doesn't get us anywhere.
We finally realized that if you worship a different God than me, or have different ideas about the finer points of theology, or wear different clothes, or have different skin, I can still coexist peacefully with you, as long as you accept the basic tenets of our society. In fact, that acceptance allows us to achieve prosperity and strength never before dreamed of.
That rationality and tolerance is the central damned tenet of our civilization. That is why we are who we are.
And commies are trying to get you to forget that.
Because that is the most effective way to destroy the culture that makes us great.
Yes, the people who developed that culture and demonstrated its clear superiority were largely white.
Those who would denigrate the white race are utter morons with no sense of history. And they should be called out for it.
However, when you allow others to frighten you into grouping up with your racial tribe YOU are betraying the principles of that culture.
That is why it is so destructive.
The central principle of western civilization? Reason over emotion.
When you allow your most base tribal instincts to overrule your rational ability to judge people based on their character and actions, YOU are the traitor to your own heritage.
You can't MAGA if you destroy the truth and light passed down to us.
Do not allow the fear mongering of race baiting commies to bluff you into abandoning reason.
What makes America great is not a race.
It is a culture.
It is a culture that respects the rule of law. It is a culture that sanctifies individual rights and freedoms. It is a culture that expects each of us to stand for the rights of our brothers, even if we disagree with them.
People with white skin who do not live the principles of that culture are not MAGA. People with any other color skin who embrace those principles are MAGA af.
Do not let the hyenas frame the question in your own damn mind. You will lose if you are so weak minded.
They are trying to destroy the culture that has given us, and the rest of the world, all we have. Don't help them.
They want you to be afraid. They want you to group up by race. Fuck them, and fuck anyone who carries their water.
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
My father is in the power generation industry. His company makes software to allocate production amongst different generation assets: nuclear, coal, gas turbine, wind turbine, solar, etc, while meeting physical constraints (some unit types can't be turned up/down very quickly), all while meeting regulatory requirements, maintenance schedules, and maximizing profit under power and fuel price forecasts.
I say all this to help you understand that he's intimately acquainted with how all this works. He's been a power grid engineer for 45 years at this point. As was his father before him.
He said that, after reading the regulatory letter, he didn't believe they were substantially limiting the spin up of resources with the requirement to attempt to buy power first, because there was none to be bought. He would know.
So, yes, it was ridiculous virtue signaling to include that requirement, but it didn't mean squat in actual operation.
Charging $300 for aspirin is unconscionable because
- the aspirin cost $.25
- the hospital is actively preventing you from using alternatives
Neither of those apply here.
The fuel costs were astronomically higher due to the demand... They're just passing that cost on to you, exactly as the contract stipulates.
The power company can't stop you from using wood, propane, or a gas powered generator to heat your home.
There is some fuckery in that there are very few places in the country where you can choose from more than one electric provider, but no one could generate cheap power with gas prices as they are.
Sucks, but reality sometimes does.
Not true, brother.
You can choose to heat your own home with electricity, natural gas, propane (guess what, if you filled your propane tank last month, you didn't pay "surge" pricing), wood, etc, etc.
Or just turn down the thermostat, put on more clothes, chop some wood, do some jumping jacks, etc.
You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
WTF? Really?
A large number of preppers would like a word with you...
It's a socialist game to act like you didn't have any choices and someone else should be responsible to take care of you.
I do agree that we should remove more regulation, allowing people more choice, but I don't currently believe it would have changed much here.
A $17k electric bill sucks, but that's what happens when you hit record energy pricing and make absolutely no accommodation in your consumption. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Any attempt to soften this blow, without holding the consumers responsible, will WEAKEN our ability to weather a crisis like this in the future.
Quit with the emotional arguments!
The power companies didn't do anything nefarious.
The coldest weather on record created the highest power demand on record, which created the greatest natural gas demand on record.
A free market, operating normally, would expect to see record natural gas prices at the same time. This isn't some scheme to defraud Texans. This is how a free market works.
If you want to protect yourself against price surges like that, the free market allows you to do so. Hedges on critical commodities are a thing for a reason. You just have to prepare before the emergency.
Texans took care of one another, largely without government interference.
That's MAGA af.
Don't cry like a simp because the free market operated properly.
If government regs made it worse, then you should be pissed.
We don't need any of this "boo hoo hoo, everyone in the country needed to stay warm all at once, and I had to compete with others for the limited supply of natural gas".
That's how it works, and reality doesn't care about your feelings. GTFO with that socialist BS.
Decentralization means he can't shut it down.
It is way more vulnerable to a government induced crash now, however, because more government regulated institutions have bought in.
I'll own Bitcoin through that simply because he can't shut it down.
Don't allow others to stand astride your ability to trade.
Also, Joe can't print $4 trillion in Bitcoin next year, so that's good.
Your test sounds like it would do the job.
I have a proposal for a quicker test:
Do a brain scan whole you explain how UPS eliminated all of the left turns and backing up from their routes.
If their brain lights up, thinking about how that could be accomplished, and why you would want to do it, you have a voter.
If it gives the equivalent of the eyes glazed over vacant stare, next, please!
If they have the curiosity to wonder about first and second order consequences of strange sounding policies implemented in complex systems...
You can probably assume 3-6 on your list.
I keep admonishing people not to engage in demoralizing sarcasm, though the sentiment is exactly correct.
So, if we can't trust the feds to look into it, what would pedes do?
The chans love a good mystery. What data can we get
- during the attack
- potentially from a cooperative gab leadership
Do we have people here capable of looking in to this? I bet we do!
I bet the chans would be interested, given their well known feelings about censorship, and their penchant for conspiracy-theory hunts.
Maybe he should have stood on principle, like Trump, and not engaged in deep state level shenanigans.
Trump is the cleanest mfer to grace DC with his presence since... Well, maybe ever.
That is what allowed him to get as far as he did.
And if you think Trump "lost", if you think his movement hasn't fundamentally changed the attitude of the peasants toward their oligarchs...
well, if you think that, you're not paying attention.
This is the right attitude.
I live in Oklahoma. It's basically the same here, though I haven't lost power. It helps that I can see the cloud from the cooling tower on a massive natural gas turbine plant from my house...
That said, tomorrow is forecast to start the main melt. It's the first day in over a week we'll clear freezing. And the highs will be well above freezing for the remainder of the ten day forecast.
What I'm saying is, we've basically made it through now.
But taking matters into your own hands is MAGA af. Keep it up, pede.
I never joined the military. But I came really close. And I didn't bail on it for what I would now consider to be the "right" reasons...
It's pretty effed to recruit our young men with promises of honor and moral rectitude, then to send them into the places we do with the orders we issue.
There is certainly honor in being willing to put your life on the line to protect the rights and lives of your fellow citizens.
If that's what our military spent its time doing, I bet so many of our brothers and sons wouldn't come home hungry for the barrel of a pistol.
You can't change the lies you were told or the mission you were sent on. Remember why you thought you went.
Thank you for being willing to serve, even if it didn't turn out to be what you expected. May your demons let you rest at night.
Define yourself by who you choose to be today.
Don't be afraid to warn young men about it.
Not the same thing.
AOC is absolutely manipulative, and is pretty good at it. But she's not intelligent. At all.