Putting the Forced in Teaming
Putting the disgraceful LA Times Editorial Board in their place (again)
In 1997 the self-help book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence was published. Written by Gavin de Becker, an individual with a rather pecular background as a security specialist both from high profile individuals such as Supreme Court Justices in the US Government to notable celebrities such as Cher, Olivia Newton-John, and Dolly Parton to name a few.
One of the more prominent concepts to arise from his famous book and to escape into popular culture is the concept of forced teaming.
It works more or less as such, one individual approaches another in need of help. Take for example a man helping carry a woman’s items which she inadvertiantly dropped up to her apartment. Good-natured humans are more than willing to help others in need, and human in general cater around reciprocity. So the incentive for the woman to believe the man is indeed here to help is likely a given. It becomes then a shared goal for both indivduals working as a team to get the woman’s items into her apartment. She wouldn’t normally let a male stranger into her personal space but her guard has nonethelesss dropped.
Stop here if you haven’t seen a similar movie before.
Even if, or when the woman suspects something is off, it’s often too late.
Plus, it’s taboo to question a fellow team member. For goodness sakes, they’re trying to help after all! How dare you question their good nature!?
Forced teaming of course need not involve horrific violent crimes, which will not be mentioned specifically here. Readers can fill in the blanks.
Forced teaming often times also involves powerful entities claiming they’re in for saving something - say humanity, or this third rock oribiting aroud the sun which if often called the planet. They’ll try to entice you to help, and often case you’ll oblige.
(A complete list, for just CA alone would crash your web browser.)
In other words,
warned us.1“Energy is life” as
likes to say. Better yet, cheap, abundant, and reliable energy to be specific leads to an even more prosperious life. Uber smart humans figured out how to harness the power of a substance so energy dense and useful that has said something akin to “if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.”This “it” was hydrocarbons.
Another great thinker comes to mind, Thomas Sowell, who said, “there are no solutions, only trade offs.”
If there’s ever a trade-off for hydrocarbons, it’s that their use by humans has resulted in greater carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere than the systems on the planet can take along with other externalities such as particulate, heavy metal pollution and land use conflicts. The former resulting is what has become general consensus as humans modifying the climate of the planet - and is seen to be going in a negative direction. Even before the new ice age, followed by global warming, then climate change and now climate crisis/global boiling it was slowly being recognized that the release of the byproducts as a result of using these substances had negative side effects. Another group of smart people slowly figured out how to mitigate and/or reduce these negative side effects. While far from perfect, that effort contiunues to this day. A group of “smart” people with a noticeable anti-human and anti-civilization agenda also demanded over the years that hydrocarbons provided next to zero benefit for human flourishing, despite being ones who largely thrived from their use, often in extraordinary ways even the middle to upper classes in the developed world are unable to access.
A different group of smart humans later discovered how to release the nearly infinate amount of energy by splitting atoms. This was used for two purposes, one as a weapon of mass murder that if completely unleashed could end nearly all life on the planet, and other as a clean source of energy, the latter almost too good to be true. The two uses have sadly been conflated since then both intentionally. Fortunately the former has not been used since the end of WWII but unfortunely the latter is underused. (One can thank in large part that “smart” group as well for that.) The latter is key to making any sort of dent with climate change while maintaining human flourishing.
Now getting back to forced teaming.
Like clockwork, the anti-human, anti-civilization, anti-Californian Los Angeles Times Editorial Board steps in with their usual amount of nonsense.
No, I’m not accusing them of being kidnappers, murders, or other horrific crimes, although little surprises me these days. I woudn’t want to search their archives prior to 2017 for a certain Harvey, or even a few decades ago for a certain Roman. Just saying!
But their views remain nonsensical and immoral, quite literally cheerleading for the ideologies and ideologues who’ve led to the de-civilization and population decline of the “5th largest economy in the world.”
In other words, I still would not let them anywhere near my loved ones.
But this is getting off topic.
Take, Editorial: It’s lights out for incandescent bulbs. Did anyone even notice? (link to archived version to deprive LA Times of ad revenue).
First of all, yes, people did notice.
Second of all, 2014 called and wanted its news back.
To be fair, people noticed a change to expensive, grotesque and inferior, mercury-containing typically non-dimmable CFLs. They noticed the classic cronyism that the light bulb manufacturers were on board with the change that by the way was the transition so to speak to LED bulbs. LEDs ended up offering a product that consumed even less electricity, were dimmable, and often available in a spectrum of white light color temperatures and other colors. These things not only didn’t typical last as long as advertised but they contained small amounts of mercury requiring special disposal. (LEDs contain small chips making them e-waste and legally not allowed in household waste too.) Breaking a CFL was also not ideal given the presence of that same mercury.
But even LED bulbs, given their lesser energy loss to heat, greater energy efficiency, and spectrum of colors still don’t match up to the good old fashioned incandescent. A lot of people love the soft, warm, light of the incandescent as it mimics natural light from the sun and fire. They love it so much to the point where LED bulb manufacturers began to imitate these bulbs in both style and color temperature, marketing them as vintage.
Dr.
, who writes the excellent substack Natural Selections quoted Louis Brandeis who wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” In another piece she comments about the human eye (and mind’s) ability to see light. It’s a stunningly beautiful bit of writing, which makes everything here sound as nails scraping a chalkboard.
Most LEDs appear to not address the problems, particularly with blue light, that Dr. Heying aludes to in her second piece with their inability to deliver near infrared light, otherwise known as NIR which among other things produces subcellular melatonin.
The sun emits NIR photons at a staggering rate. Moonlight does as well, at a rather less substantial rate. So does firelight. Even incandescent bulbs do. But compact fluorescent bulbs, and the LEDs that we currently have access to, do not. So those of us who spend most of our time inside, with little exposure to sunlight, working in “modern” spaces without candles or incandescent bulbs, are getting very little NIR.
In cooler climates, others who are fans of incandescent bulbs enjoyed their literal warmth too. In other words they found benefit in the wasted heat given off when the bulbs are illuminated.
Naturally the LA Times mentions the phase out of the almost century and a half technology, one of the many labors of Edison, was met with resistance by the Demon Party (Both parties are identical in my view. Same you-know-what but some simply see glitter in one but not the other). The Board (spoiler alert) towards the very end reveals that the initial ban was signed into place by George W Bush as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. But they need to get their two-minute hate in even though both major political parties are virtually the same.
Assault on freedom or not, statist bootlickers love to tell other people what to do and mandating light bulbs is no different. The bait and switch with gas stoves earlier this year is a major red flag stating the obvious that politicans and bureaucrats should seldom be trusted. It’s no wonder there were people who insisted the ban was an assult on their freedom. The late Senator Mike Enzi, from the heart of coal country Wyoming, even wrote a bill attempting to repeal the initial Bush law. The name of such bill was the eye-rolling Better Use of Light Bulbs or BULB Act. Naturally Enzi was just as partisan as the LA Times blaming the opposing party and President Obama for the initial debacle.
It’s true those old light bulbs sucked a lot of electrons relative to garbage CFLs and largely bluelight blinding LEDs but the sheer idea of letting people spend their money as they please, letting them deal with the higher electricity costs themselves , if that’s what they want to stomach causes such types to crash. But some people are just not happy leaving others alone, letting them live their own lives.
The Board asserts of the ban that sanity prevailed.
Oh please.
Who wants to bet that deep somewhere in the homes of each of these goons are still a handful of these criminal light emitters? They may be no Noble Gaia-Savior Al Gore but nevertheless likely want to LARP as him.
The Editoral Board asks of the whole phaseout of the bulbs, “Did anyone notice?”
Does a bear you-know-what in the woods?
Well, that the bear on the flag of the Bear Republic, because it’s dead (and that specific species extinct) but there are plenty of bears in-state who do you-know-what in the woods.
They ask this question after mentioning the immense backlash by the undesirable side of uni-party, plus the obligatory mentioning of the Orange Himmler, and on top of that even linked to a story about people panic purchasing the bulbs prior to the ban.
So yes people did notice. It’s not the first time the LA Times has completely brushed off people though.
But the Board contridict themselves again writing,“The end of the era of bulbs lighted by hot and inefficient filaments couldn’t have been more uneventful. Instead of generating a final outcry, it was met with a virtual shrug.”
Except you morons spent almost two paragraphs covering just that. (Nevermind, they’re rural folks, right?)
They correctly cite the switch by about 85% of Americans to LED bulbs.
Well mostly correct.
That high percentage to no surprise. Fiat money subsidies initially distorted their price making them competitive with the ‘ol Edison bulbs until China could catch up and provide us with them on the cheap, likely with an environmental impact that would not appease the Holy Greta. On top of that their superiority to CFLs, the transition bulb, the Editoral Board left out entirely of their piece was deemed by the market, aka, people with agency, as garbage. This is actually the source of much of the outrage in earlier years over the light bulb transition.
LEDs have been marketed with having absurdly long lifetimes too. It’s been difficult to find incandescents for the most popular light socket sizes for years now.
At least in California as in many other states, the rising cost of electricity, in part due to less reliable generation sources also makes the switch to LEDs more economical. One “60W equivalent” LED household bulb requires just 15% of that of its incandescent cousin.
It’s not towards the end that the Editorial Board goes full bananas a-la-forced teaming in addition to piling on the need to ban more items to not “overheat” the planet.
The muted reaction suggests that we have nothing to fear by phasing out other outdated and wasteful technology to fight climate change. To slash carbon emissions, we need to quickly replace fossil fuel-burning appliances, such as heaters and stoves, and vehicles with cleaner versions that don’t overheat the planet and pollute the air we breathe.
And of course Mr. “Would an occasional blackout help solve climate change?” tweeted out that exact quote.
It’s this use of we that’s especially horrific. The idea that the LA Times is trying to incorporate the rest of society into their delusions may not equate to being thrown into the bottom of an empty well, or into an empty basement with a telephone, but it’s still sinister. Energy and civilization deprivation is real life, not a Hollywood production.
Among other nonsense, the board boldly lies to its readers about gas stove bans, apparently forgetting their own city has one as do several cities in the state.
“The performative outrage by GOP lawmakers over environmental protection policies is now routine; House Republican members recently introduced legislation to stop a nonexistent ban on gas stoves.”
Fact check: it’s closer to existing than not.
Another bout for the forced teaming here too of course inconveniently leaving out that few Californians voted for this stuff. It was mandated largely by unaccountable bureaucrats with entities such as CARB.
We’re already on our way. More than 50% of new homes are now built with energy-efficient, electric heat pumps instead of polluting gas furnaces. And electric cars are surging in popularity, with zero-emission vehicles now accounting for 1 in 4 new car sales in California. By the time state regulations phase out the sale of new gas-powered cars in 2035, perhaps they will seem just as obsolete as incandescent bulbs are today.
Those new homes, rare, for what it’s worth in the state, are largely out of reach to the average Californian too. Forcing heat pumps, which can work well in much of the mild CA climate, in an area with some of the country’s highest electricity rates and failing grid is a recipe for problems.
The Board, typical of the woke overlords in the state are silent, about the effects these policies are on the poor and marginalized groups. California is almost a feudal state these days, with a seperate set of rules and way of life for some over others.
They close with two more wes.
Dumping incandescent bulbs for better alternatives is a small but important part of transforming how we consume energy on a warming planet. Completing it with so little public consciousness is a hopeful sign that by the time we reach other energy milestones, they too may seem just as unremarkable.
There is no “we” here.
There are individual humans who have their own agency. Humans who are geniune and sincere in promoting flourishing.
Consider the teachings of de Becker. They’re critical life skills for surviving the modern California.
As a self-described “climate change skeptic” this is what I believe about climate change, carbon dioxide, GHG emissions, and fossil fuels.
1. God created Carbon, Oxygen, and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) a few years prior to the Industrial Revolution.
2. God created our climate and controls it through numerous and various natural systems (e.g., geological, atmospheric, astronomical, terrestrial, etc.).
3. Humans have not, do not, and cannot control the Global temperature and climate. (If you believe humans do control them, please show proof.)
4. With all due respect to the United States Supreme Court, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has never been, is not now, and never will be a “pollutant”.
5. Life could not exist without Carbon, Oxygen, and Carbon Dioxide.
6. Carbon Dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere and represents 0.04% (400 ppm) of all Green House Gases (GHG).
7. Water vapor is the most abundant GHG at 70% of the atmosphere. A change in the amount of water vapor is 1,750 times (70% / 0.04%) more likely to affect the climate than CO2.
8. Variations in the sun’s heat and light, and the earth's orbit along with a myriad of other factors contribute to changes in the Global temperature and climate. (See #2 above)
9. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the Global temperature have changed (up and down) throughout Earth’s history.
10. A greater amount of CO2 in the atmosphere contributes to greater plant growth.
11. Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere which contributes to greater plant growth.
Good stuff, Green Leap Forward!