Notes from the edge of civilization: Nov. 26, 2023
Belief in the American Dream slips. Governments forcing EVs on people. Should you be allowed to sell your kidney? Sticking to principles.
With Thanksgiving Day just behind us, we here at Collapse Life are still thinking about and reflecting on the many things we are grateful for.
Having experienced life in many countries, one thing the Collapse Life team is always thankful for and never takes for granted is being able to live in the United States of America.
Sadly, a new poll indicates many people feel the promise of America — the ideal that if you work hard, you can get ahead — no longer holds true. Half the respondents in a recent Wall Street Journal survey said life is worse now than it was 50 years ago.
The story quotes Oakley Graham, a young stay-at-home father in Missouri. He says by some measures he’s living the American dream but he still feels insecure.
“We have a nice house in the suburbs, and we have a two-car garage,” said Graham, who is 30 years old and whose wife is an electrical engineer. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that money was tight.” For him and most of his neighbors, “no matter how good it looks on the outside, I feel we are all a couple of paychecks away from being on the street.”
Somebody should let the President know that’s how most people feel, since as recently as last month he said: "The American people are smart as hell and know what their interests are. I think they know they're better off financially than they were before. It's a fact."
Biden blamed the media for painting a negative picture of the economy and creating anxiety amongst the public, when according to him the country is doing just fine economically, thank you very much.
"You all are not the happiest people in the world," the president told reporters. "And I mean it sincerely. You get more legs when you're reporting something that's negative.”
The president is certainly right about one thing: Americans are smart as hell. Certainly the ones who live in New Mexico are smart enough to take a hard pass on the implementation of a control grid under the guise of an electric vehicle mandate.
“If EVs have so many benefits, why are they so unpopular with ordinary New Mexicans,” asked the editorial board of the Albuquerque Journal.
They went on to state:
Currently, fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles account for less than 1% of the 650,000 registered vehicles in New Mexico, despite federal tax credits and EV maker subsidies.
Most EVs in New Mexico are owned by people in Albuquerque and Santa Fe who make six-figure incomes. The vast majority of New Mexico has zero to one registered EV.
That’s not surprising. Publicly available charging stations are concentrated in urban areas and are practically non-existent in rural areas, distances between cities and towns are vast and frequently involve changes in elevation, and EVs are too expensive for most New Mexicans.
As Collapse Life recently pointed out, electric vehicles are actually far costlier than they seem, thanks to accounting chicanery by virtue of government regulations and subsidies. A recent report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation showed that in 2021, federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs by an average of almost $50,000.
Incidentally, $50,000 is around the median income of a resident of New Mexico. Yet, despite clear signs of rejection from the people of the state, New Mexico’s governor Michelle Lujan Grisham insists on following California’s example by pushing new rules that will require 43% of all new passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks shipped to the state’s auto dealers to be zero-emission vehicles by 2026.
As the Albuquerque Journal rightly points out in its editorial, not only will this mandate devastate automotive dealers in New Mexico but those in neighboring states where those rules don’t apply are salivating at the prospect. Yet another example of government intervention skewing the markets by mandate to the detriment of their constituents.
One hopes that, when EVs become mandatory in New Mexico and beyond, people are not forced to sell an organ to be able to afford one. Which leads to the interesting (and macabre) question of whether or not you should be able to sell an organ if you so choose.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh laid out a few points for and against the subject this weekend, while oddly shoe-horning in a reference to Argentinian president-elect Javier Milei. We figure he needed to sell his editor on the piece’s newsworthiness somehow!
Sanity reared its beautiful head last week in the form of an admission (of sorts) that forcing an injection on people who are principled and stand for what they believe is never a great strategy. Especially when you now have two hot wars — Ukraine, Israel — plus adversaries that continue to grow in strength with each passing day, compounded by an alarming drop in recruitment numbers.
What are we talking about? This!
According to the Military Times:
More than 17,000 service members balked at taking the shots, citing safety fears linked to the vaccine’s speedy development and spurred by misinformation about messenger ribonucleic acid technology, as well as concern over fetal cell lines used in formulation and testing. The more the controversy raged in the news, the more troops asked to skip the shots, Military Times reporting found.
The overall total of separated service members, according to the Military Times, was 8,339. The ability of these men and women to stand on principle in the face of utter ruin must be lauded and applauded. These are the people that are America’s bravest. If rejecting a forced jab was an IQ test, these folks passed with flying colors.
And finally, our latest podcast guest, Alexander Pohl, lays bare the farce, fraud, and corruption behind the push for so-called green energy. He went from working on sustainability projects at large banks and management consulting companies, to living a farm in northern Sweden. When a huge wind farm began construction next to his property, he started digging into what was going on and what he discovered is quite a tale! We’re sharing a teaser here, but encourage you to take the time to watch the whole conversation.
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