Nathan: Behind a large resort complex on the South Dakota side of the Nebraska border, ten miles from the pretty town of Valentine and twenty-five miles from its namesake town and capital of the Burnt Thigh People (better known by their Lakota name, Sicangu, or their location: Rosebud), on a small mound, there rests a giant tower with the now-familiar three huge blades of a power turbine.  Rests is the correct word, for this turbine, unlike its thousands of sisters from the waters of Long Island sound to the top of Tehachapi Pass between Middle and Southern California, does not kill hundreds of birds a year.  Because, no matter how long you wait, those blades do not turn.  Why?  Because the transmission which converts the spinning of the great blades into the whirring of an electrical generator is shoddy: it wore out long before it was supposed to, and can be replaced only at great cost, not affordable by a tribe, a nation, that is in essence bankrupt.  The crony capitalists, aided by environists (environmentalists is what they call themselves, but they are all too often brainless – thus, take out “mental” and you have environists), have their profit and don’t care:  the people who wrote and administered the grants which funded the construction have made their salaries and gone on to other grants and schemes.  But no one gets an erg of power, no one gets a dime of payment for power produced.  It is not uncommon.

This story by Ms. Noon is what my wife and I have been telling many people for many years.  Now, it seems that SOME of the environists are understanding, and the crony capitalists are once more demonstrating that the environists are, at best, their cats-paw and  convenient cover for the plutocrats to continue to dominate the rest of society.

Death by Renewables
Marita Noon

“Even green projects have an impact on their surrounding environment.” Green energy, specifically so-called renewables, has been sold to the American public as the answer to a host of crimes against the planet. But, as Lex Berko points out in her post on Motherboard, “even green” has its downside. Biomass may be “renewable,” but burning it releases CO2. Then, it’s expensive: “A 100% renewable-energy mix from in-state sources could cost up to five times more,” reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). And, energy from wind and solar sources kills birds.

Wind turbines chop up bald and golden eagles, and other endangered species, like a Cuisinart–the taller turbines with longer blades (which produce more energy, and, therefore, is where the trend is heading) have a predicted annual ten-fold mortality increase. The authors of  a new study on bird collision mortality at wind facilities concludes: “Given that we found evidence for increased bird mortality with increasing height of monopole turbines along with a move toward increasing turbine size, we argue that wildlife collision risk should be incorporated with energy efficiency considerations when evaluating the ‘greenness’ of alternative wind energy development options.” If the Department of Energy were to meet its 2030 goal of having 20 percent of the nation’s electricity generated from wind, they project: “a mean annual mortality estimate of roughly 1.4 million birds.
[Read the rest of this excellent article here, and bookmark the site for other great articles.]

Nathan: This article shows both the vision and the blindness of the writer, and shows that both the Democratic Party and the GOP have collaborated with  the environists AND their buddies, the crony-capitalists, to once more profit, in terms of power and money, while claiming to do one thing (“protect the environment”) when in reality doing just the opposite.

These two groups: the politicians and the crony-capitalists – the industrial complex – are parasitic on each other AND especially on the body politic: individuals and families and the rest of the businesses and producers in the community and society.  These companies use the power of government to steal money paid to them to buy products that the government defines and accepts, plus enough skimmed off the top (and sides) to fund government from DC to Pierre to Rosebud to Antelope Community (in the case of the wind turbine I started talking about at the beginning).  Probably, if the equipment were NOT shoddy in the first place, it would not have been purchased and used.

Government buying is so complex because it is trying to ride a very fine line between maximizing profits by making shoddy products and NOT making shoddy products SO shoddy that they rile enough people to anger and the entire process blows up in everyone’s face.  It has been that way since the Mexican War and the War Between the States (on BOTH sides) and the Indian Ring days.  And it continues today, just fine-tuned and vastly larger. These people, these groups, are parasitic on each other AND on society not because they HAVE to be, but because they WANT to be.  It is not a symbiotic relationship between the State, the Environists, and the Crony Capitalists, because each of them would actually do BETTER in their STATED purposes and objectives if they were not being gnawed on by the others.  But is their NATURE to do so.  So we all suffer, but some suffer more than others.