Big news: Lee Hepner at Big observes Thanksgiving dinner prices falling by almost 5%, and sees the hand of the Biden Administration antitrust efforts behind it – specifically, our Justice Department has broken (of all things) a turkey monopoly, our government has thwarted one proposed airline merger and forced another to be put on hold, and a federal jury found two big egg-producing corporations guilty of price-fixing, meaning those high prices that were all over the news last year had little to do with avian flu. It’d be nice if the Biden campaign would actually, you know, run on these efforts – but it’d also be nice if our “liberal” media covered these efforts the way they hysterically covered sky-high egg prices in the first place.
Have some more good news! Portugal lately relied entirely on renewable electricity for six consecutive days at the end of October and beginning of November. Plus Portugal made so much electricity they were able to export it to Spain for most of that stretch! Six days in a row is a big deal; the more it happens, the less we’ll have to hear about the “war on coal” and other manufactured outrages. And we should at least make it harder for Our Glorious Elites to manufacture outrages.
In a related note, the Guardian tells us that legendarily-frigid Norway has done a great job relying on heat pumps to heat their homes, largely through federal subsidies and – this is important – the absence of federal subsidies for fossil fuels. So when nay-sayers whine that heat pumps don’t work when it’s too cold, they actually mean it only returns about twice the heat for the electricity you use to run it when it’s far below freezing, which is another way of saying we want you to use the perfect to murder the good. Way too many folks still prefer chaos to progress.
In another related note, I am more than a little surprised to hear that electric scooters and e-bikes have displaced four times more demand for oil than electric cars have done, though, admittedly, much of that increase has come from China, where good Chinese were already riding mopeds a lot. I’ll admit I’ve always kinda side-eyed this option, figuring that e-bikes, especially, are for people who don’t want to exercise, but a) that may not even be true, since most folks split their exercise off from their transportation and b) it sounds like it’s actually helping save the planet. Also c) I moved to an area that’s really, really hilly and I see the attraction of an e-bike a little better now.
Ho hum, Iowa Republican official’s wife gets convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud, as she apparently filled out election forms for Vietnamese immigrants who, imagine that, didn’t really understand what she was doing. Strange how we only seem to catch right-wingers for actual voter fraud, despite all the whining they do about it. Ms. Taylor faces a max of five years of prison per charge; not that I think she’ll really get that (or that I think she should get that), but it’ll be interesting to hear right-wingers suddenly find Jesus about long prison sentences.
Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that Elon Musk’s "thermonuclear" defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is “About Destroying Free Speech.” He must hope us “little people” don’t get it in our heads to tabulate which big corporate ads turn up right next to all that disgusting anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi content he allows on Twitter! I’d say I hope Mr. Musk loses this frivolous lawsuit in the most humiliating manner possible, but I actually doubt he’s physically capable of humiliation. Which is yet another reason a civilized society shouldn’t let billionaires grow this big!
Finally, Rwanda has seen a significant drop in malaria cases, to the point where its national Biomedical Center says it’s on track to achieve zero malaria. Scientists point to increased use of mosquito netting and indoor insecticides as major factors in the drop, and that, I’m sad to say, will be good practice for when too many folks refuse the malaria vaccine the World Health Organization has just approved. But Rwanda’s success reminds us that good people doing good works are everywhere on Earth, even in nations we call “developing” – or worse.
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