Tag Archives: University of Michigan

Didn’t Anyone Think This Through?

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On Tuesday, The American Thinker posted an article about the demand for copper that the switch to electric vehicles would create.

The article reports:

A team of University of Michigan researchers recently discovered that the amount of copper needed to keep up with the manufactured demand created by the globalist E.V. agenda is “essentially impossible” to generate. On May 16th, Engineering and Technology published an article by Tanya Weaver which covered the results of the new study:

Copper cannot be mined quickly enough to keep up with current policies requiring the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), according to a University of Michigan study.

…

The study found that renewable energy’s copper needs would outstrip what copper mines can produce at the current rate. Between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of human history up until 2018 just to meet current copper needs without considering the green energy transition.

To meet the copper needs of electrifying the global vehicle fleet, as many as six new large copper mines must be brought online annually over the next several decades. About 40% of the production from new mines will be required for EV-related grid upgrades.

So what exactly do these numbers look like, in context? Well here’s this, also from Weaver:

[A]n EV requires three to five times more copper than petrol or diesel cars, not to mention the copper required for upgrades to the electricity grid.

‘A normal Honda Accord needs about 40 pounds of copper. The same battery electric Honda Accord needs almost 200 pounds of copper,’ said Adam Simon, professor of earth and environmental studies at the University of Michigan.

‘We show in the paper that the amount of copper needed is essentially impossible for mining companies to produce.’

Wow. Wind mill blades that don’t biodegrade filling up our landfills, solar panels made with toxic chemicals, and now not enough copper to be green. Can we please just go back to fossil fuel. It works and can be used in a way to minimize pollution.

When Life Gives You Lemons…

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The American Thinker posted an article today about Kathy Zhu, the newly crowned Miss Michigan.

The article reports:

...Young Kathy Zhu, the newly crowned Miss Michigan, lost her title on account of her “offensive” tweets. The press went through every last one of the crown winner’s tweets over the years and found a couple they decided were ‘offensive,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘insensitive,’ broadcasting those. After that, the Miss World pageant organization de-throned her.

Justice. The left triumphs. That’ll teach those Trump-supporting deplorables their lesson.

Except that now in place of a mere beauty queen, the left has got a Frankenstein’s monster on their hands.

Zhu has been offered a prominent place on the Trump 2020 campaign. She’s going to be out there, winning votes for Trump, padding his total further.

Miss Zhu is expected to be able to reach younger voters. She is an Asian-American and may be able to reach voters in that community. She is definitely not an old, white male!

The article notes some of the reasons Miss Zhu will be an attractive campaigner (other than the fact that she is beautiful):

First, the awful treatment she got from the pageant. Here’s CBS again:

The 20-year-old received an email last week from the pageant removing her from her position, which she shared on Twitter.  

“It has been brought to the attention of Miss World America ‘MWA’ that you social media accounts contain offensive, insensitive and inappropriate content,” the letter said. 

It also said that Zhu no longer met the requirement of “being in good character.” “Therefore, and effective immediately, MWA does not recognize you as a participant of any sort or in any capacity as it relates to any and all events of MWA,” it concluded.  

Did I just read the word ‘deplorable’? The question answers itself. People are going to sympathize. 

Second, the double standard. Zhu’s fellow Asian-American, Sarah Jeong, who unleashed an amazing string of bad tweets that truly were racist and immature, got to keep her job after she was exposed, all because she was left wing. Zhu? Not so much. Standards are different, see, when the person on the spot is a Trump supporter. File under more votes for Trump.

Third, the vile treatment she got in the press. Look at that opener in the first passage of the CBS story above. They’re throwing around words such as ‘racist’ and ‘insensitive’ over one tweet questioning why women ought to be trying on hijabs as a carnival act, and another bringing up black-on-black violence, a sad reality that’s obvious. They’re not neutrally reporting now. They’re out to get her. We already know that many Americans voted for Trump based on the press’s treatment of him. We see the dynamic freshened up, here.

Fourth, the vile treatment she got in the press in how they got their ‘scoop.’ Some media creep, who follows beauty contests very, very, very closely (and most of us don’t – cripes, these contests have the depth of whirled peas!) searched her tweets one by one, going through years of them, and then doxxed her to come up with the perfect years-old bad tweets to virtue signal with. The tweets were weak tea, but they decided that they were enough to pin her for a Bull Connor racist and they did. Anyone can see the sick dynamic of that. Result? More votes for Trump.  

Fifth, let’s bring up an unrelated matter: Notice that she’s a University of Michigan student. Fine school, U of M, and young Sasha Obama plans to go there, too, a very prestigious school. So we have an Asian-American who ended up at Michigan instead of … Harvard? First thing anyone’s going to think is that she was Harvard material, got shut out of Harvard and ended up at Michigan based on Harvard’s discrimination based on race. Anyone else who’s experienced that is going to relate.

Somehow a lot of the attacks by the political left on President Trump and his supporters have backfired. It’s hard to be on the offensive when you don’t have any real ammunition.

 

The Sorry State Of Freedom On Our College Campuses

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A friend sent me a link to a Washington Post article posted on October 9. The headline in the article is, “A second Michigan instructor withheld a recommendation letter from student headed to Israel.”

The disturbing part is the reason given:

The article continues:

Her email echoed the one that arrived last month in the inbox of Abigail Ingber, another junior at the University of Michigan. 

“I am very sorry, but I only scanned your first email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail,” John Cheney-Lippold, a cultural studies professor, wrote to Ingber in early September, upon realizing that the reference was for a program at Tel Aviv University. “As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there.”

The concept that Israel includes Palestinian land is simply not true. As Walid Shoebat has stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.” Jordan was established to be the Palestinian state. The Palestinians were kicked out of Jordan after they attempted to overthrow its government. The Arab countries have kept them as refugees for generations in order to gin up anger against Israel with the hopes of driving the Jews into the sea. It is unbelievable that our college professors are encouraging this sort of behavior. It’s a shame our college teachers don’t know history. In actuality, the land occupied by Jordan was initially given to Israel.

The article concludes:

Michael Zakim, a cultural historian at Tel Aviv University, argued that the boycott would end up undermining “the Palestinian struggle” by unwittingly supporting forces “determined to delegitimize the humanism and internationalism that predominates on Israeli university campuses.” He labeled as “inanity” some of the means taken to “discredit Israeli academic culture,” such as the refusal to serve as an external reader on a dissertation.

Feisal G. Mohamed, then of the University of Illinois and now at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, responded, saying the boycott didn’t compel each of the actions decried by Zakim. Still, he reasoned, “any and all available means must be used to end an occupation.”

At Michigan, the board of regents declined last year to form a committee to investigate divesting the university’s endowment from companies doing business with Israel, after the student government passed a resolution supporting such a move.

But refusing to throw its weight behind BDS isn’t enough, Secker (Jake Secker) warned. If the university doesn’t take further action to insulate its students from the political actions of their professors, he said, it could have a crisis on its hands.

“This is an epidemic that’s starting to begin,” he said. “Especially being someone who has an Israeli background, I took it personally. It really disturbed me.”

Any university discriminating against students who want to study in Israel should lose all federal and state funding. BDS is not an acceptable policy, and the government should not be funding it.

If You Truly Believed This, Would It Change Your Behavior?

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Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about the behavior of people who sincerely believe in climate change (or at least claim to).

The article reports:

We keep hearing how global warming is the biggest crisis facing mankind today. But a new yearlong study finds that those ringing the alarm bells the loudest are the least likely to change their own behavior. They just want everyone else to.

The study divided 600 adults who reported on their climate-change beliefs into three groups: “skeptical,” “cautiously worried” and “highly concerned.”

Then the researchers — from the University of Michigan and Cornell University — tracked how often they reported doing things like recycling, using public transportation, buying environmentally friendly consumer products, and reusing shopping bags. And they asked about support for government mandates like CO2 emission reduction, gasoline taxes and renewable energy subsidies. The Journal of Environmental Psychology published the findings.

The findings are not a surprise to many of us.

The article reports the results:

The researchers found that the “highly concerned” group was the least likely to take individual action, but they were the most insistent on government action. The “skeptical” group, in contrast, was the most likely to recycle, use public transportation and do other environmentally sound things all on their own. Skeptics were least likely to endorse costly government regulations and mandates.

“Belief in climate change,” the researchers explained, “predicted support for government policies, but did not generally translate to individual-level, self-reported pro-environmental behavior. ” (emphasis mine)

Two notable examples of spouting climate change rhetoric but creating an unbelievable carbon footprint are Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. Both live in luxurious homes which use much more electricity than the average American, and both travel on private jets. I have no problem with this–they have earned what they have. However, if you are going to support government regulations that negatively impact people earning a fraction of what you make, you really should practice what you preach.

Icebergs On Lake Superior

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CBS Local in Minnesota posted a picture on Saturday of icebergs on Lake Superior. This is the picture.

(credit: Wis. DNR)

The article further reports:

According to a National Geographic report, the summer temperatures of the Great Lakes are expected to be colder this year because more than 90 percent of the lakes had been covered in ice during this past winter.

Global warming, anyone?

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