There’s a line between offering words of hope, and cruelly making false promises that cannot be delivered. US Vice President Joe Biden went way beyond that line in a recent speech. Or could it be the guy is actually dumb enough to believe the things he said?
It’s utterly disgraceful that the VP of the US would stoop so low. Biden symbolizes what’s wrong with science today. Either it is being run by absolute ignoramuses, or just plain deceitful people. The evidence indicates it’s the latter.
According to Biden, government running science can only produce wonderful miracles, and quickly – in just a few years!
All that’s needed is your trust.
Already today they have the means to control global climate, they say. A world without ills awaits you! What are you waiting for?
Excerpts of Joe Biden speaking at Cypress Bay High School graduation ceremony (emphasis added, and not in order):
Imagine the breakthroughs that are on the horizon and just beyond it. Imagine by the time you’re in a position to buy your first home, putting a roof of solar shingles that will cost no more than today’s ordinary shingles that will be able to power your home, heating, cooling, running appliances at a fraction of the cost your parents pay today. Imagine a world in which hunger is vanquished by crops that don’t depend on the soil or water or fertilizer or pesticides to thrive! They’re just around the corner. Imagine famine being a memory — and with it, the end of so much war and conflict that plagues so much parts of the world! Imagine a day when the lightweight materials, cleaner fuels, [and] advanced engines simultaneously make our air cleaner — allowing us to go the equivalent of hundreds of miles to the gallon. And maybe, most importantly, freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil and all that entails for a nation. Imagine a day within your lifetime when doctors can and will engineer your white blood cells to attack cancer cells and leave healthy cells untouched, allowing cancer patients to live out a full life without undergoing the difficulty some of you observe, painful chemotherapy and radiation procedures. Imagine a day, when in your, doctors are able to regenerate entire body parts and limbs that have been damaged and lost, not only saving tens of thousands of lives, but restoring the thousands of our Iraq and Afghan veterans coming back in need of prostheses, so they will be able to live a full and ambulatory life.”
If his audience believes all that, then those graduation caps really need to be replaced with dunce hats.
Remember: if anything ever happened to Obama, he’d be President! With a little luck, only another half year before we’re out of the woods.
“Crops that do not depend on water…” I’m waiting for that. My experiments with houseplants haven’t worked out so far.
He also forget electricity too cheap to meter, and the obsolescence of air travel since we can Beam Up, very soon now, talking dogs via genetic engineering, Artificial Intelligence, so there will finally be intelligent life on Earth, and, hey Dude: Where Is My Flying Car?
I tried growing a flower on a plate of glass – didn’t work either.
The solar shingles might become a reality; why not. Cost efficiency, not considering cos of storage, will be achieved only in 2038; earlier if conventional sources of electricity are outlawed.
About cancer: Well, we do engineer monoclonal antibodies for that cancer killing job, watch Morphosys, I owned the stock several times and I like it (don’t own it ATM). Engineering white blood cells is a bit too hot at the moment. If anything can kill you instantly it’s your own immune system… I also recommend a 100mg Aspirin a day. Allegedly has cancer killing properties. Can’t harm too much IMHO so why not; use the ones that are stomach acid resistent; they’re the same price as the simple ones.
* Assuming German insolation of 800 sun hours a year, a price halfing rate of 10 years for PV, and standard electricity generation cost of 5 Eurocents a kWh.
Notice how Biden talks about producing energy “at a fraction of the cost”, yet his eco-wackos and Democrats do everything possible to make it expensive. Cheap energy is the last thing they want. In Europe energy is cheap…that is until they tax the hell out of it.
The scheme is to make cheap energy so expensive it makes expensive energy seem cheap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc
Yeah, alright, I don’t think Biden has a clue, I just wanted to mention the two points that are remotely possible.
A much more interesting technology that is difficult, but possible to build:
http://www.startram.com/
Will take a lot of wind turbines to run, though.
A similar system was used in the past. It involved a special beanstalk.
If the Japanese are now forced to turn on their nuclear power plants, does it mean that Germany will followe suit?
No.
8 of the 16 reactors are still running anyway for the moment, to be phased out over the next 10 years IIRC. Reversing the decision to switch off the other 8 would be political suicide. Germans are mostly preferring outrageous cost, and maybe even blackouts, to nuclear power, which is for most of them evil itself.
It has become EASIER to convince them that CO2AGW is a lie since Fukushima; as they can now rest their green political religion on the anti-nuclear pillar again, and don’t need the increasingly false looking CO2AGW scare anymore as a foundation for their green beliefs.
I assure you, the answer is that it is basically self-delusion, in thrall to a self-serving belief in unquestioned, beloved dogma. This self-delusion, and the tyrannous actions it incites, is rampant in the world today, especially among the so-called “leaders” of the nations of the world. Dogma is ascendant, or threatening ascendancy, on every level of public discourse today, and on all sides of every debate (even the most-widely-read among “climate skeptics” are putting out propaganda, essentially, that the “greenhouse effect” is real, when it should have become apparent 20 years ago that it is not).
I am curious about this claim that the greenhouse effect is not real. Please elaborate.
It’s real, just not accurately modeled.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/mdgnn-limits-on-the-co2-greenhouse-effect/#more-6600
The author is less diplomatic, as he concludes in his first comment ‘This is the biggest mathematical modelling and experimental cock up in History and it’s about time it’s exposed for what it is, amateurs who got it wrong and are refusing to admit their fault. This is not science, it’s alchemy.’
“…only another half year before we’re out of the woods.”
Changing the idiot standing on top of the mountain does not change the mountain. We truly have a huge job ahead of us, and many, many “miles to go” before we sleep. Think “Germany December, 1945”. Everyone is going to have to pitch in and it won’t be as simple as changing the Bozo in the Oval Office, or #10, or elsewhere.
PS: But it’s a Good Start!;-)
The running mate is almost always chosen for the ticket based on his or her ability to bring a voting block (think Sarah P.) or a state’s electoral college votes (think LBJ). However, in Joe B.’s case, the idea seems to have been to lighten up (humor) an otherwise haughty ticket. Joe is without the colorful clothes, but otherwise like the jester of European monarchies. So, we have an Old World tradition carried over into the colonies.
Biden has the brains of a brick, but I actually agree with most of what was written for him above. (Except the part about crops growing without water or fertilizer!) but most of that has no chance of happening under the Democrats. We will be too busy collecting our dole and trying to survive on food stamps. These things will happen only when the unemployment rate goes below 5%, and the GDP is growing at or above 5% per year. That won’t happen as long as the National Deficit is sucking a Trillion dollars or more from Capitol investment every year.
I agree Ed, much of what Biden predicted probably will come to pass. But if it were to depend on science by all-knowing Government bureaucracy, I think we can be pretty sure the kids Biden was preaching at would not see it in their lifetime.
In similar vein, interesting to see that Obama on the news this morning lecturing the Europeans on how they should fix their economy, well really?
But not in the coming years, as if with the magic wand of government. He’s giving false hopes.
Biden is our court jester. He functions in virtual universe which occilates between absurd and ridiculous.
Biden perfectly fits the designated role of deterrent against Presidential assassination.
It’s apparently been a tradition since at least Clinton.
It goes farther back: Does anyone remember Dan Quayle…?
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
Germany currently sends 55bn EUR per month into the PIGS via the Target2 mechanism; that’s 687.50 EUR per head per month of the German population. (Assuming 80mill population. I love these calculations.)
http://www.wallstreetjournal.de/article/SB10001424052702303753904577454350210240464.html?mod=rss_homepage_germany
And here’s a nice set of charts for all Eurozone countries. The imbalance seems to grow exponentially.
http://www.querschuesse.de/target2-salden/
France is still surprisingly stable. For a country that stops working with 60 not bad. The Germans are the biggest idiots of Europe.
Devastating criticism of the renewable energy subsidy regime in the FAZ by a guy from the “German monopoly comission”; never heard of that one before. He not only points out that a subsidized green job destroys other jobs elsewhere (hope the German journalists some day understand that), but also that it does nothing for “climate protection”, as the CO2 credits not needed will simply lead to a smaller market price for CO2 emissions and will be used elsewhere.
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wirtschaftspolitik/energiepolitik/energiewende-auf-uns-rollt-ein-kosten-tsunami-zu-11774307.html