1) Climate Change Craziness – Not Climate Change – Caused Hawaii Fires
In keeping with the left doctrine that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, the New York Times shamelessly blamed the wildfires in Hawaii that killed more than 80 people and cost tens of billions of dollars in property losses on climate change.
This is fake news. There were many contributing factors to the fire, but a big one was the left’s obsession with “green energy” which created the tinder box. We’ve tracked these revelations from major news stories:
"In a funding request last year, Hawaiian Electric asked the state Public Utilities Commission to allow it to spend $189 million on climate resiliency efforts over the next five years, including to protect against wildfires and downed power lines. 'The risk of a utility system causing a wildfire ignition is significant,' the company’s application stated, citing the PG&E situation." Source: CNN 8/14/23 https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/us/hawaii-maui-wildfire-power-lines-invs/index.html
"After the 2019 wildfire season, Hawaiian Electric even commissioned a report, which concluded that the utility should do far more to prevent its power lines from setting invasive grasses on fire. Since that report less than $245,000 was spent on wildfire projects. Instead, the utility spent millions trying to meet a 2015 mandate created by Democrats that would require 100% of the utility's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2045." Source: Washington Examiner 8/18/23 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/climate-activists-are-getting-people-killed
The bottom line: instead of spending millions of dollars on fire prevention as the experts recommended, the Public Utility Commission spent that money and more on complying with an absurd state law that “by 2045 the state will be 100 percent renewable energy.”
Last week mortgage rates poll vaulted over the 7% hurdle to the highest rate since April 2002. Biden has succeeded in taking the interest rate on home purchases from 2.8% under Trump to 7.1% in just 30 months in office.
Higher mortgage rates hurt home buyers and home sellers. Sellers get a lower price for the house and buyers pay $10s of thousands of dollars more in interest payments over the 30-year life of the loan.
The only good news is that mortgage rates are still almost 10 percentage points lower than they were when Jimmy Carter crashed the economy.
Here’s Bill Maher of HBO echoing what we’ve warned about since the unconscionable and unconstitutional COVID “emergency” lockdowns. Mark our words: it’s coming.
Gee, we wonder what that crisis will be. Oh, yes, climate change, of course.
4) Study Finds ChatGPT Is Politically Biased to the Left
Are the robots, AI algorithms, and search engine protocols going to be programmed to simply regurgitate the leftist misinformation machine of the New York Times, MSNBC, and NPR?
The latest research from Brazil and the UK reached a strong conclusion that the answer is yes in both those countries and the US.
"We find robust evidence that ChatGPT presents a significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the US, Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the UK."
The study found the AI default answers leaned consistently far closer to the Democrat answers:
We see this as deeply disturbing as ‘truth” gets defined by the left. But this is also a huge market opportunity for a more politically neutral entrant in the booming AI tech sector. That’s a much better solution to bias than having the government regulate AI, which always has a way of making things worse.
5) More Fallout From COVID School Lockdowns – Chronically Absent Kids
More Covid lockdown long-term collateral damage: Three years later COVID school lockdowns are continuing to have long-term negative spillover effects on children. Before the pandemic, only 15 percent of public school students were chronically absent – more than 18 or more days a year.
Today, Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee says his data shows an estimated 6.5 million additional students are now chronically absent.
Students who are chronically absent — are at higher risk of not learning to read and eventually dropping out.
The chart below shows that in some states, such as Connecticut and Massachusetts, chronic absenteeism remains double its pre-pandemic rate. It would appear that informing a generation of kids and parents that they don't have to show up for school during COVID has taught them that being in the classroom isn’t important at all.
The long-term impact of school lockdowns will be with us for many, many years to come.
