By Matt Landry

When asked how such a longtime Republican as myself came to vote Democratic in this year’s election, I had to stop and think a while. I grew up in a general liberal milieu, having attended Catholic schools from Kindergarten through college, and carried this stance into adulthood without giving it much thought.

Serving in the military for four years exposed me to many divergent schools of thought, from fundamentalism to atheism on the religious side, and from socialism to populism on the political side. For the most part, I avoided extremes, finding most arguments to have some strands of sense embedded in them.

It wasn’t until the Carter years before the charisma of the Kennedy administration began to wear thin, and I switched to the Republican banner, but Trump’s china-shop smashing only enhanced Hillary’s appeal. Even so, I wasn’t too concerned when he won, thinking maybe a savvy businessman is exactly what we needed.

By now it’s obvious that that’s exactly what we didn’t get. Under the guise of the traditional banner, we had elected a surly populist, enthusiastically appealing to a dystopian populace.

In all these twists and turns, I found myself recognizing that I had never actually articulated what sort of values I really followed. As a longtime reader of the Economist magazine, which considers itself ‘conservative,’ what choices was I making? More importantly, where did I fall among the possibilities?

The Economist is typically labelled ‘socially liberal and financially conservative’. As they describe the political spectrum,

“Both reject the Utopian impulse to find a government solution for every wrong. Both resist state planning and high taxes. The conservative inclination to police morals is offset by an impulse to guard free speech and to promote freedom and democracy around the world.” As such they can balance each other as “Conservatives temper liberal zeal while liberals puncture conservative complacency.”

Such high minded descriptions, alas, have been overcome by recent events. It’s obvious that the past four years have upset any civilized accommodation. Political opposites have become ‘demons’ which deserve not only our disapproval but our outright hatred. Worse yet, the wider the gap, the more supporters of each wing are pushed from the center, threatening the very equilibrium in which traditional institutions have been historically found. The social bindings of church, family, tradition and local institutions themselves are becoming riven by the centrifugal forces created by today’s whirlwinds.

What is labelled ‘Republican’ today has ceased to resemble the conservative side of the social dyad by which democracy has progressed so well over the past two hundred years. It is no accident, as documented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, that human welfare has advanced globally by nine discrete measures over this same time frame. In his book, “Open” he notes that such progress isn’t unique to today, but historically has never managed to spread beyond single appearances across the globe. He also notes that the signs of the decay that insured the failure of such earlier societies can be found today.

Today’s Republicans, in their attitudes of distrust of science and the free press, systemic racism, fear of the immigrant and a systemic discontent which belies a general welfare, undermine those features of democracy which underpin Norberg’s two hundred years of social improvement.

What has been labelled historically as ‘conservatism’, emerging in the optimistic terms of the Enlightenment, has been replaced by a surly and pessimistic populism. How else could this social phenomena today be described? People who are well off, secure, and comfortable are quick to cite the ‘carnage’ inflicted in society by ‘socialists’.

As Marc Ambinder points out in a recent post,

“the physical pleasure that the brain’s reward system, which is linked to the brain’s disgust system, doles out means that the more yucky the other side appears to be, the better we feel about ourselves.”

The need for indignation thus emerges as a leading driver of opinion.

As the Economist reports, an objective view of world affairs is seldom on display. As an example, asked whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance. By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often. The record clearly shows how quickly poverty has receded in two hundred years. In 1820, 94% of humanity subsisted on less than $2 a day (in modern money). That fell to 37% in 1990, and less than 10% by 2015.

So, to the question of why I am not a Republican, I must insist that, by the definition offered by the world’s leading conservative publication, the Republican party is no longer ‘conservative.’

Matt Landry is a retired simulations engineer now living in Colorado, blogging frequently about “the Phenomenon of Love” at lloydmattlandry.com.

Photo Credit: Andy Feliciotti at Unsplash

By Deborah Lindberg

Tonight a case worker will drop off a baby, and for the next four days and nights my family will change her diapers, divert her from the kitchen cupboards, and breathe a sigh of relief when she naps. Her mother, Alice*, and disabled older sister are alternately living at the hospital or a women’s shelter, and with no family in town, they needed an “auntie” to help with the baby. Thanks to the organization Safe Families for Children, my family became honorary relatives.

As you might imagine, I’ve become pretty sensitive to comments about “freeloaders” who live off our tax dollars and whose problems would be solved if they just got a job. And I don’t love hearing how impractical it is to offer health care to everyone who can’t afford it. That’s an immediate death sentence to a well-loved four-year-old I know.

Another friend, Sebastian*, leaves in the darkness of early morning to install drywall in new homes. A few years ago, his own government decided that protest organizers are enemies of the state. After he was threatened and hunted, and his business was burned to the ground, Sebastian crossed multiple borders to seek asylum in the U.S. He was lucky enough to eventually get it, though Trump’s Department of Homeland Security immediately appealed the judge’s decision. That appeal is still pending, but for now Sebastian’s American life has inched forward thanks to a team of volunteers that provided a spare bedroom and helped him complete paperwork, get work authorization, and learn English.

If you want to argue—and many do—that Sebastian stole a job from an American, that he should have stayed and worked to stabilize his own country while fleeing a murderous regime, or that he should have followed the (nonexistent) immigration laws to come here with a visa, I’ll discuss that with you.

Take heed: I’ll be woefully impatient about it. I’m working on that.

Because I know both Alice and Sebastian, and because I’m fairly sure that you, reader of Mark’s blog, are a pretty decent human, I am confident that if you met them you would become their advocate and cheerleader. We are designed to attach our own hearts and stories to those of the humans we encounter. It’s the faceless people with easy labels that we have trouble with.

Here’s an interesting fact from millennia of Jewish culture: Israel’s greatest heroes are the people who put aside their personal interests to plead for others. Consider Abraham who argued with God to spare the wildly violent people of Sodom from destruction. He knew God well enough to tell him, “Wait, this isn’t the kind of God you are!” and then go round after round with the creator of the universe to defend a bunch of strangers with terrible reputations. In fact, Abraham literally “stood in God’s path, blocking his way” until God gave in. The chutzpah!

It’s not so different from the chutzpah of activists who break the law by leaving water in the desert so that immigrants crossing the southern border don’t die. (I know, it’s hard to believe that death by dehydration has been legislated.) Or churches who allow immigrants to have sanctuary from ICE so that they aren’t permanently separated from their families. Regardless of your views on immigration law in the U.S., you’ve got to admit that these activists are solidly Abrahamic, protecting the defenseless and arguing for mercy for people who aren’t even part of their tribe.

Moses is another heroic pleader. After Moses and God had been away from camp for too long, the newly-emancipated Israelites got so nervous that they made their own god—a golden calf, of all things—and then gave that hunk of melted-down bracelets full credit for their elaborate ten-plague rescue! I can’t imagine a better way to insult someone, and indeed, God told Moses he would just incinerate them and start over with Moses’s own family.

In spite of all the ways that plan would benefit Moses and his legacy, he immediately responded with horror: “Why would you lose your temper and destroy your reputation in the world by wiping out your own people?” And God immediately relented. It’s almost as if God wanted someone to argue against hellfire and brimstone all along.

An interesting note: Once Moses hikes down to see the Israelites’ behavior first-hand, he loses his cool and some pretty gruesome punishments follow (see Exodus 32 for the whole story)—a reminder that God doesn’t always show up the way we think He should (more on that in a few weeks). Still, Moses stuck to his guns with God: “If you won’t forgive their enormous sin, erase me out of the book you’ve written.” Moses didn’t want to be a part of any story that didn’t include rescuing these very people.

I’m no Moses. My well-fed judgy nature kicks in when Alice spends her meager income on taxis and Minnie Mouse tutus for her girls, when she complains about the free medical care her daughter receives, or when she explains that she’d move closer to relatives if their states had better welfare programs. My life would be smoother if I could focus on just my own family and the friends I have hand-
picked over the years. But I don’t want to remove myself from Alice’s story.

I know God well enough to know that he wants me to wrangle for abundance and safety for all the Alices.

You know who is not a major hero in Jewish culture? Noah. That guy was told about the imminent destruction of everything he knew, and instead of warning his neighbors or pleading for mercy on their behalf, he put his family onto a boat and sailed away to safety. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy—in fact, I’m just like him. I built my own sturdy boat out of a college degree, a loyal spouse, savings accounts, a charter school for my kids, a big house in a suburban neighborhood, two well-maintained cars, and plenty of stable and pleasant friends.

The boat isn’t really the problem, though. The problem is this: Am I trying to pull swimmers onto this boat? Noah wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t exactly a hero, either. I don’t think he really knew what God was all about, and he missed his chance to be an agent of mercy.

I hope you don’t think I’m comparing Alice and Sebastian to idol worshippers or Sodomites—that’s definitely not the point here. They’re excellent human beings who work hard, are selfless, and who pursue goodness relentlessly. If you knew them, you wouldn’t begrudge them any of your tax dollars or another day without citizenship. But again, that’s not the point. Whether they are tribe members or outsiders, we are called to be an Abraham. Whether or not we approve of their behavior, we are called to be a Moses. We were all meant to be the heroes who offer benevolence and plead the cases of others. If we know God and what he’s about, we’ll put our boats to good use.

*Names have been changed in the interest of privacy.
For more information about organizations referred to in this blog, visit:

• Safe Families for Children at https://safe-families.org/
• Colorado Hosting Asylum Network at https://www.coloradohostingasylum.org/

 

Many thanks to Deborah Lindberg for her guest post. I asked her to write this week because I know her to be a great example of someone who’s committed to Jesus, but not afraid to think for herself.

I was born and raised in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Home. It gets cold there on occasion, and a bit icy, but I don’t remember anything close to what happened earlier this week. At one point, every county in Texas was under a winter storm warning. Few of us will forget what happened to Texas’ power grid and the images of ceilings exploding with water, homes flooding in the aftermath, and a 133 car pileup on I-35W. All in the backyard of my youth. Difficult to believe.

In the middle of all of this came opinions and perspectives from some of my conservative friends about what was truly behind the massive energy blackouts. The narrative went something like this: Windmills and other green energy appliances couldn’t handle the cold, stopped working, and taxed the rest of the coal/gas based systems, causing them to shut down as well.

This is supported in a Wall Street Journal article:

“The policy point here is that an electricity grid that depends increasingly on subsidized but unreliable wind and solar needs baseload power to weather surges in demand. Natural gas is crucial but it also isn’t as reliable as nuclear and coal power.

Politicians and regulators don’t want to admit this because they have been taking nuclear and coal plants offline to please the lords of climate change. But the public pays the price when blackouts occur because climate obeisance has made the grid too fragile. We’ve warned about this for years, and here we are.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, tweeted, “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”

I hadn’t done any homework on this, so I bought into it initially, not catching the veiled accusation that, were it not for liberal politics and its hippie tree hugging religion, we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. I believe in green energy, but I do have a similar discomfort with the pushy, judgmental, insensitive way that liberal politicians push their agendas. Conservatives do that too, of course. American politics isn’t a nice, peaceful place, and it certainly isn’t Christian. There’s evil on both sides of the hill to be sure. It would be nice if we could move forward in our epic energy re-think as fellow Americans on the same page and with the same purpose, but we’re well past that. It’s become too tempting to see the other side as a threat to our freedom.

When an unthinkably massive blackout happens, the finger pointing begins.

Anyway, I set out to do some homework, reading articles from Texas based news outlets and querying my social media connections for their perspective.

A respected friend from college, a fraternity brother from Sweetwater, sent me a ton of info. I haven’t gone completely through it yet as some of it’s a little too technical for me. As he hails from a place full of windmills, he’s got some things to say. They’re expensive. The “boneyards” are all over the place. What are we supposed to do with all that waste? Do you know how big a single windmill vane is, much less 100?

Green energy, windmills especially, have a dark side that you and I could never fathom. This guy from Sweetwater can. I’d add some thoughts about the not-so-green energy that’s required to build and service these behemoths. The off-gassing from composite construction processes alone are significant. Guess where all of those gasses go? They don’t simply disappear, or get repurposed by the atmosphere.

But there’s much more to the green energy saga, especially as it relates to Texas.

I’ll pen my thoughts and perspectives on this, and try to make it interesting for you, while fully admitting that I’m no energy expert. In addition, I’ve in no way done all the homework required to tell you what to think. As always, feel free to comment as that’s what drives us bloggers, even when you don’t agree, especially if you have important data/perspectives crucial to this discussion.

Spinning the Numbers

The WSJ article I cited above is interesting, claming a 93% drop in wind production during the blackout. But that’s not what happened. Referencing two charts below (from the article), the average wind output from Jan 18 to the eve of the blackout was ~ 250000MWh. On the Feb 16 reference point, During the blackout, it fell to 90087MWh, a drop of 64%; significant, but nowhere near 93%. Given the fact that wind only makes up 24% of Texas output, it’s hard for me to buy the idea that a ~ 15% reduction in overall capacity would crash the whole system.

Here are the charts referenced in the article:

What they’ve done here is instead compare wind production at its highest to it’s lowest point during the blackout, then use words like “plunged” to distract us from the correct math. If I go with their version of the story, wind energy also “plunged” on Jan 22, 61% but nothing close to a blackout. Interesting for an article that wants me to be wary of the spin that liberal pundits are putting on this catastrophe. It’s also interesting that a different WSJ article suggests a different problem: “The widespread cold weather led to record demand for electricity.”

Overwhelming Demand

It’s impossible for natural gas output to soar to 450% because wind production fell by 30%. Obviously, the system was taxed to overload. Even if coal and wind could’ve increased, things still would’ve popped. Ancient space heaters, homes built for much milder climes, etc, caused things to soar. As so many Texas media outlets have reported, they simply weren’t ready for this kind of demand.

“Demand for electricity during the weekend cold front far exceeded what the Electric Reliability Council of Texas predicted for a winter storm. ERCOT implemented blackouts early Monday morning to reduce demand as low temperatures forced more power sources offline than expected.” ~ The Texas Tribune

Cold. Really Cold

It’s true that these windmills failed because they couldn’t handle the cold, hence, windmills are bad. But is that true for all windmills? Vermont, for example, a place much colder than Texas, boasts 99% power generation from renewable sources. To my knowledge, they didn’t have near the outages that Texas did. If cold kills windmills, why doesn’t it kill them in cold places? I have a good friend who travels regularly to the Antarctic for a project he’s overseeing. Here’s what he has to say about windmills that operate in cold weather:

“We manage and operate both Wind and Solar technology in Antarctica and it’s extremely efficient. Works down past -50f in blowing snow and wind. Solar is actually 125% more efficient in colder temperatures. We operate entire field camps on wind and solar.”

The stations referenced above don’t come close in comparison to Texas’ renewable output scale, but if you’re wondering whether or not windmills can be winterized, here you go. Natural gas lines can be winterized too, and will freeze if they’re not, another problem that added to the catastrophe.

ERCOT itself refused to put the blame on renewables: “Extreme weather conditions caused many generating units – across fuel types – to trip offline and become unavailable.”

Again, maybe I don’t have the right information, and my carefully curated data sources are nowhere near an exhaustive representation of everything that’s out there. But you’ll understand why I side with outlets like Reuters, NPR, PBS, and the Associated Press.

“During a historic cold snap that has left millions of Texans without electricity, water, and heat for days, claims that the state’s use of renewable energy sources, specifically wind energy, are to blame have circulated on television and social media. These claims are misleading, as they shift blame for the crisis away from what appears, so far, to be the root cause: record cold temperatures that affected generation and transportation across all fuel types (including, but not limited to, wind energy), combined with the inability of the state’s independent and isolated electricity grid (operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT) to source supplies from elsewhere.”

“Add it all up, and the state suddenly had a lot of power plants, of all kinds, that simply couldn’t function — and not enough electricity to go around. Electric grids must maintain a delicate balance between supply and demand at all times or risk catastrophic failures. With supply so inadequate, ERCOT saw no other choice than to force demand down with a blunt instrument: outages.”

“With millions of Texas residents still without power amid frigid temperatures, conservative commentators have falsely claimed that wind turbines and solar energy were primarily to blame.”

Let’s See Those Fingers!

There’s a ton of data to digest here, but we don’t want that. What we seem to want most, based on the way we (don’t) process data, is national division. The great state of Texas experienced a brutal catastrophe, and our national need for an enemy drove so many of us to draw conclusions based on the articles that best fed on our emotional, not-so-cognitive resources.

Alas, I realize that I might be doing the very same thing here, pointing fingers at the finger pointers, log-in-eye, blogging in the hopes that others might see their splinters, only referencing the data that makes me feel good. For now however, whatever data is out there seems to support the idea that Texas’ power grid failed because it simply wasn’t prepared.

I think it’s better to beat our fingers into plowshares, to use our personal resources, not limited to our social media influence, for the good of our country, not the destruction of it. But, as I’ve mentioned before, if all stories only have one side, if the people who don’t think like we do are the enemy, not worthy of a seat at our table, we’re done.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a fellow pastor about a married couple that we were trying to help. He said something that has stuck with me since: “Whenever you walk down the wrong path, you have to walk back.” A country in error can never be magically catapulted back into unity when it’s been walking down the divided, finger-pointing, politically segregated path for so long. We’ll have to walk back. Every step.

The knee-jerk, anti-data, not-so-veiled accusations that the Texas power outages came at the hands of liberal politics, is another example of how far we’ve been walking in the wrong direction.

With some reservation, I’ll include myself in this problem. Everything above needs to be verified by the reader. And while I’m not done with my homework, I can assure you that I have some deep emotional ties to being “right,” and you being “wrong.”  My hands, like yours, love to curl up into a ball, extend a digit, and point it somewhere besides myself.