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E-fuels sound like a panacea, but there's not enough spare electricity to make them.

Since all those “improvements,” airline fares have gone up 17.7 percent in just the last year alone. Given that travel had already reached pre-COVID levels by mid-2022, you can’t just blame that on increased demand either. //

Some people actually do want a budget flying experience without all the bells, whistles, and perks. If Biden gets his way with this latest executive order, mandating all sorts of new costs for airlines, that 17.7 percent jump in prices since 2022 will look small by comparison. Is that really what Americans want? Because there’s a difference between something that sounds good and something that produces a deluge of unintended consequences.

But while the market effects of Biden’s proposal are clearly seen, is there a more insidious explanation for his move than simply trying to protect consumers? What happens if airline travel becomes even more expensive? The answer is that demand will eventually drop, which means fewer people flying.

Ask yourself, given the left’s obsession with global warming, what would make them happier than for you and others to be stuck at home and not on an airplane? As far as the White House is concerned, hammering the airlines accomplishes two goals. It lets them pose as faux warriors for the little people, but more importantly to them, it crushes an industry that they despise.

In the past three weeks I visited Bomi, Gbarpolu, and four counties in the Southeast, and I have now been to every county in Liberia. This fulfills my promise to the U.S. Congress to be an Ambassador to all Liberia, not just Monrovia. I am happy to report that each capital city has its own unique bundle of trade and cultural ties, and that Liberians throughout the country share a warm, welcoming spirit!

Unfortunately, on the trip I was startled and deeply troubled to encounter multiple county hospitals that received not one penny of what they were promised in the 2022 budget. Hospitals on which lives depend, where outbreaks are prevented and suffering is alleviated, did not receive any portion of the US$100,000 or more appropriated by the legislature for them to operate.

An end to greenhouse gas emissions, a global framework to control nuclear proliferation, a preemptive remedy to looming water wars, and unlimited energy worldwide are just a few of the concrete solutions offered up in Tom Blees's brilliant and timely Prescription for the Planet. Everyone is worried about global warming, energy wars, resource depletion, and air pollution. But nobody has yet come up with a real plan to resolve these problems that can actually work-until now. Prescription for the Planet proposes a workable blueprint to virtually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century and solve a host of other seemingly intractable global problems.

Just three days after sending its “pre-litigation” letter to HHS, which included the zinger, “If we go to court, you will lose. I write in the hope that you will see reason (or at least the law) and we can skip to the easy part,” HHS beat a hasty retreat.

“The game was simply not worth the candle for HHS,” Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, the religious freedom law firm representing the hospital, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “It realized it would be playing with fire in court if it stood by its absurd demand, so it chose wisely. We are glad Saint Francis’s can continue to serve those most in need while keeping the faith.” //

Windham noted that there are other sources of fire in the hospital, but CMS only singled out the candle for further scrutiny.

“In this same inspection, they were OK with pilot lights in the kitchen and will gas dryers. It was just the candle that was the problem,” she said. //

There is no doubt that the Biden White House and its parent organization, the Obama administration, are implacably hostile to Christianity in general and public devotion to it specifically. It was Barack Obama who tried to convert the Constitutional Freedom of Religion into FDR’s Freedom of Worship. We have to be constantly on guard or this liberty will be snuffed out by the use of the regulatory power of the administrative state. //

Laocoon
a day ago
Lesson Learned: Push back on these bureaucratic monsters and it's at least an even bet that they'll fold like Streiff's cheap suit.

Solzhenitsyn pointed out that Russians who either resisted or fled from the Cheka often got away with it. It was only the passivity of Russians when faced with authority that empowered the NKVD and other orgs to get away with their atrocities. //

DaveM
a day ago edited
I thought it would change the instant a suit was being brought. There was no way this was going to pass muster.
Looks like the TJC surveyor had a chip on his shoulder. Think of them as the Inspectors General of the Medical World. My own 40+ experience with these people is that they are pretty good at what they do but we do see a jerkwad like this every few years.
I was surprised to see NFPA 99-2012: 11.5.1.1.2 cited for a Chapel. That standard is associated with the administration of medical gas in a clinical environment.

fyi: For those not familiar with it
NFPA 99-2012: is the Healthcare Facilities Code and is one of the Bibles used in assessing Healthcare Facilities during licensing and accreditation surveys. Chapter 11 covers medical gas equipment. Currently the 2012 code is the one used.
The standard 11.5.1.1.2 prohibits open flame in a patient care environment where medical gases are being administered to patients. The context of the chapter makes it abundantly clear that the intent is to apply this to a clinical environment -which a Place of Worship is not.

The NFPA Life Safety Code NFPA 101-2012: (which is the Life Safety Surveyor's Bible) specifically recognizes the importance of candles like this for religious purposes and makes allowance for them to be used safely. The cited Hospital most definitely adheres to a safe practice no one should have an issue with.

In any case the final authority on whether the hospital's practice under NFPA 101 is is not TJC or CMS. The specific regulatory agency is the AHJ (basically the local Fire Marshal).

“You wrote, for instance, in a Forbes column last year that renewables actually increase global emissions. Do you stand by that comment?” he said.

Furchtgott-Roth explained the piece.

“Yes. Because they’re made with coal-fired power plants in China. I did explain that if renewables were the wind turbines and solar panels are made and batteries are made with coal-fired plants in China,” she said. “I did explain that if these were made with emissions-free energy such as nuclear power, then the benefits to the environment would be much greater. But many environmentalists who are in favor of renewables are against dense emission nuclear power, and therefore making these renewables often raises emissions.” //

When Whitehouse questioned her about the human component of climate change, she was ready for him again. She pulled out a book and waved it.

“Yes. Scientists disagree on the human component of global warming,” she said. “And in this book, ‘Unsettled’ by Steve Koonin, who was under secretary of energy under President Obama, and who taught for 30 years at CalTech and has a PhD in physics from MIT, he says that, ‘It is uncertain how much human activity affects global warming. The case is unsettled,’ and I’m no better scientist than he is.”

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Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. Deuteronomy 7:9   How does a parent help an adult child? When your little boy or girl was small and fell down and … 5 Guidelines To Parenting Your Adult Children Read More »

Last night’s Met Gala was infinitely more gut-wrenching.

This annual gathering in New York, where the world’s most privileged, pampered prima donnas indulge in an orgy of unctuous ostentatious extravagance, has grown increasingly nauseating in recent years as the rest of the planet fights killer viruses, war, and the worst cost-of-living crisis in memory. //

But they excelled themselves with the 2023 theme: “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” And a dress code “in honor of Karl.”

Karl Lagerfeld was… to put it mildly… what all these woke warriors would categorize as ‘problematic’.

In fact, he was one of the most ‘problematic’ people in fashion history; damned by his own words as a racist, sexist, fattist, homophobic, abuse-tolerating, feminist-hating embodiment of everything this A-list crowd professes to most loathe. //

Famously, cockroaches can live for a week without their heads.

Their bodies still function without brains.

It was the perfect guest.

Nearly 2 million local National Grid customers could be seeing red over hefty proposed rate hikes pushing them to get more green.

The natural gas and electric utility giant has proposed gas-use increases of 17% for its New York City residential customers and 16% for Long Islanders, with the company blaming inflationary costs and government green-energy requirements.

Supreme Court may finally end rule of bureaucrats with ‘tragic’ Chevron case
By John Fund
May 2, 2023 8:29pm

The Supreme Court made a tragic mistake almost 40 years ago.

In the 1984 case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, it ruled federal judges must defer to a regulatory agency’s interpretations of federal laws, so long as Congress has not addressed the issue in question and the agency’s view can be construed as “reasonable.”

Since then, the power of the unelected administrative state has ballooned so that it now dictates much of our economy and daily lives.

The court announced Monday it will revisit that precedent, raising hopes that this enormous federal power might be reined in.

The Constitution set up a system of separated powers in which Congress would pass the laws, the president would administer them and the courts would interpret them.

Since the New Deal, Congress has shirked its accountability by increasingly giving unelected agencies the power to make decisions of vast economic and political significance. //

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 6 to 3 court majority ruled that from now on Congress must explicitly grant regulatory agencies the power they wield.

That infuriated the activist left.

Since the spectacular collapse of President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme to rein in carbon emissions, which failed to even get a Senate floor vote in 2010, environmentalists have become experts at twisting and distorting old laws to accomplish by the back door what they could never do using legitimate constitutional approaches.

From regulations aimed at climate change to the overriding of local zoning laws in New York, activists have used that approach to lobby federal agencies to implement an agenda Congress would never approve on its own. //

One former federal regulator, appalled at left-wing efforts to ban gas stoves, told me: “They go through federal agencies like burglars who try every door in a neighborhood in the belief one of them will be unlocked.”

The court may not overturn the case in full, but the fact that at least four justices have agreed to reexamine the decision indicates Chevron deference is likely to be curbed.

Cruise briefly branched out with two sci-fi films that saw him shoot futuristic guns, operate futuristic vehicles, and put his grimacing face under straightforward titles Cormac McCarthy would be proud of. Edge of Tomorrow was profitable and lauded for its clever, pacy take on the time-loop thriller … and then there was Oblivion.

Oblivion turned a profit too — it’s difficult for a Cruise movie to not bring audiences in — but reviewers were split down the middle, and it’s rare to see it looked back on with the same fondness as Edge of Tomorrow. Even the generic title, an obscure reference to the movie’s exploration of memory, is appropriately forgettable, and its relatively slow burn isn’t friendly to fans looking to watch Cruise gun down aliens with a smirk on his face. But there’s a lot to like here, even if you can feel the genre trappings warring with the Cruiseisms.

It’s 2077, and Jack (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the only humans left on Earth. Decades ago, humanity fought off an alien invasion that destroyed the Moon and left Earth uninhabitable, and it’s Jack’s job to oversee a fleet of drones that mop up enemy survivors and convert the planet’s oceans into hydrothermal energy. He reports to a woman named Sally aboard the orbiting “Tet” space station, and with the job almost complete, the trio is due to join a colony of survivors on Titan in a couple of weeks.

Brace yourself, but not all goes as planned.

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More than 90% of used solar panels get thrown in the trash, and the world's wind industry is estimated to produce 43 million tons of blade waste each year. But some companies have found recycling solutions. Ben Tracy reports.

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To exclude multiple files or directories simply specify multiple --exclude options:
rsync -a --exclude 'file1.txt' --exclude 'dir1/*' --exclude 'dir2' src_directory/ dst_directory/

If you prefer to use a single --exclude option you can list the files and directories you want to exclude in curly braces {} separated by a comma as shown below:
rsync -a --exclude={'file1.txt','dir1/*','dir2'} src_directory/ dst_directory/

If the number of the files and/or directories you want to exclude is large, instead of using multiple --exclude options you can specify the files and directories you want to exclude in a file and pass the file to the --exclude-from option.