Number Five. Twitchy dot com. Scandal: Speaker Mike Johnson’s app to keep you from viewing porn.
Well, that didn’t take long.
We have now found our scandal with the straight, white, church-going, born-again, election-denying, MAGA-loving Speaker of the House, barely three weeks into his new job.
Speaker Johnson and his teenage son have decided not to view pornography, probably because of some warped, religio-fascistic predilection that rejects the objectification of women and insists that females be valued in a way they probably don’t deserve. The Speaker feels that men are duty-bound to offer respect to the opposite sex.
What an abysmally demeaning way to treat a woman!
The Speaker apparently suspects he has a weakness for inappropriate lewd material, a trait he likely believes he has in common with others. Such as, for example, every male human who has ever breathed air.
Acknowledging that susceptibility has led him into unthinkably perverse self-flagellation, such as likely making himself do things like reading good books and fly-fishing magazines, maybe even throwing a football with his son. All the while he could be surfing Tik-Tok videos of teenage girls.
One must ask: Exactly where will this sort of thinking lead us?
Number Four. Just the News. Oil industry blasts public funding for failing offshore wind.
What?? The wind failed?
Say it ain’t so!
It’s hard enough saving Mother Earth from certain destruction; at least she could help us a little. Without wind, the generators don’t spin and the electricity tank runs dry. Or something.
Generating electricity is hard enough by itself, but the conflicting politics of going green can make it a real challenge.
Mark your scorecard with the players:
The Denmarkians have planned their Ocean Wind project off New Jersey. They like green solutions made possible by tall white fiberglass wind generators (which are made mostly from petroleum, but don’t say that part out loud).
The Save the Whales people are from the U.S. They also like green solutions, but not at the expense of the whales, who tend to die when they get close to a wind generator.
The commercial fishermen, just trying to make a living, run fishing boats in the same locale and find that wind generators destroy fish habitat. Their business is all about green, especially the cash.
The cruise boats want to fleece well-heeled tourists, who like to invade the privacy of the whales, which will be really hard to do if the whales die because of the green (or rather, white) fiberglass wind generators.
A company called Orsted, the Denmark thing, wanted to build these wind generators to offer 2 gigawatts of power, which I thought was a laugh line when that Professor said it in Back to the Future, but which turns out to be a real thing. The other players all want a clean, pristine environment, and if we have to save the earth while we’re at it they won’t object. But no wind generators, at least not there.
And that’s all confusing enough, but then Mother Nature chimed in by not making it so windy off the coast of New Jersey. Maybe she sees the dilemma better than we do:
If you keep using fossil fuels, you kill the planet.
If you start using wind generators, you kill the whales.
So the State of New York has to ante up more tax subsidies to support the wind generators, because somehow when they pay money, the wind blows, or something. I think that’s how they do things in New York.
But New York, listening to the whales and the fishers and the cruisers, won’t put up the cash this time, maybe because Orsted from Denmark will pay a cool hundred million if they pull the plug, so to speak, on the electric wind project.
I wonder who gets that cash? The whales? Or some people?
Meanwhile, last year’s Inflation Creation Act set aside a little bit of cash for this project that is about to be cancelled: $10 billion for manufacturing, $100 million for wires, $700 million to hire bureaucrats, and another $760 million for some more wires. And then the Act adds 15% to the price of oil because we need to make it too expensive to buy, so that we can buy the wind electricity instead, because the wind is, like, free. That’s the same wind that we just spent about $12 billion on in this paragraph.
Except that the project got cancelled because there’s not enough wind.
So now that we understand the issues, it seems that what we need is more cash to make up for less wind.
Why did I think that that’s where this was going?
What’s this?? They don’t want my resume?
Imagine the growing panic of realizing that that new Bachelor’s degree in Ancient Mafagorian Rainforest Art, a field of study you really liked, might not get you a job!
You might find yourself at the end of the hiring line, behind that dumb farm kid who fixed the dish machine in the cafeteria, or even that cute barista who makes those fluffy avocado lamocca lattes so fast.
Employers are turning from the glitzy two-page resume putting the best face on things you never studied and jobs you never learned, and are now relying instead on skills-based assessments.
This means paper-and-pencil tests (although probably keyboard-and-screen) to find out how much of the work they have that you can actually do.
Google, Microsoft, IBM and Apple have all relaxed the college degree requirement for new hires. Google has launched instead a Career Certificate program and partnered with universities to launch industry-specific training.
For hiring new employees, 3/4 of companies are now using real-world skills assessments, up from only half last year. According to this article, they are finding it’s close to 90% effective in getting a candidate who can actually do the work. For the company, this means saving time and money.
But what it means for the kid looking for the job is a scary session with really confusing questions on a test, like “Add up this column of numbers with a pencil and get the right answer,” or “Which type of electrical connector would be most reliable in this application,” or “How could the following code sequence produce the same result with fewer lines,” or “Which of the following chemical agents produce toxic combinations.”
Like they expect you to know this stuff? If that’s what the test is, what’s the job like? Where’s my fluffy avocado lamocca latte?
Number Two. Just the News. Michigan House approves 2040 carbon neutral plan.
In a bold move to assure 100% carbon neutrality, the Michigan legislature has now approved a set of statutes which will ensure a healthy fossil-fuel-free environment for those residents who can find a way to survive a Michigan winter without natural gas or heating oil.
This may be part of a massive population right-sizing plan, as fewer than about 50 people are expected to live through the winter once they are forced to rely on wind and solar to heat their houses, but that is outside the scope of this article.
This kind of planet-saving initiative does not come without growing pains, so the legislature has created a new government agency to help. The Community and Worker Economic Transition Office, which is in the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, which in turn reports to the Department of Economic Consumerism for the Good of the Economic Workers, chaired by a member of the Great Lakes Economic Politburo, will help re-educate oil field workers into solar panel workers.
By force of law.
Two years ago, 11% of Michigan’s energy was provided by renewable sources. By 2040, that figure will be 100%. The nice thing about using percentages is that regardless how small the pie gets, you can still express what’s left as a percentage. So when 10% of 400 megawatts grows to 100% of 40 megawatts, you have succeeded in growing your electricity by 10 times.
This is as interesting as it is confusing. If the planet is getting so much warmer because of all the oil we are burning, then shouldn’t the winters in Michigan require less heating oil in 20 years anyway?
Maybe somebody just has their hair on fire. Which may be one of the more reliable ways to keep warm in Detroit by 2040.
Number One. Just the News. D.C. spurs civil liberties fears with anti-carjacking program.
In a move to curb the rapid growth of grand theft auto — real grand theft, not the video game — the nation’s capital is redirecting its efforts away from stopping the thefts. Now they will focus more on simply recovering the stolen car after the fact.
They will do that by learning more about who you are, where you live, and where you go.
The Metropolitan Police Department is offering free anti-carjacking trackers, which do about everything except stop the carjacking. The electronic devices track where your car is all the time. When you report your car stolen, this information is provided to police. They can then send someone to collect your car and bring it back to you.
Think of it like an unexpected concierge service.
Don’t think of it like a “They know where I am and probably what I am doing there, and can build a file of the types of places where I go,” sort of service.
The additional protection this offers the individual by letting the authorities know exactly where your car has taken you is a huge benefit in your peace of mind. For those who gain peace of mind by letting government authorities know more about them, its a great thing.
Besides all that, I doubt anyone will ever think up a way to hack into a system that provides real-time data on where your Lexus is parked right now.
And that is The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, November 17, 2023.
And this just in: The audio version of The Alligator Wrestler’s 52-Week Devotional Guide is now available at www.audible.com.
Enjoy your weekend. Take a spin in your 30-year-old car, the one with no GPS and no tracking device!
And remember the book signing for The Alligator Wrestler’s 52-Week Devotional Guide at the Friends University Library, Tuesday, November 28, 5:00 pm. See you there!
Curt
The Alligator News Roundup