A strange thing happened today. Dan Neil wrote about a car powered by an internal combustion engine. He reviews a car most weeks for the weekend Wall Street Journal. Ever since he was embarrassed to discover that what he thought was the best car ever was made by German cheaters, he’s over-corrected and found religion in electric cars. As in most single vehicle accidents over-correcting is often worse than no correcting at all.

Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests. It cost them $30 billion and they pledged to go EV to be popular again.

We can debate the 97% of all climate related scientists’ opinions until we are blue in the face but total transition to EVs is not debatable unless aliens land and rescind logic. The electrical grid nationally would have to be replaced. Africa would have to experience a huge population explosion to increase the supply of child miners because cobalt and other battery materials won’t just come when called, like our dog. By the way, do you know about the child miners? Better not look.

That’s just the small stuff. Look at an aerial photo of a lithium mine. I’ll bet you never thought of New York’s Central Park as untamed wilderness before. If you did, you could call a lithium mine a roadless, wilderness paradise. But that’s okay. You don’t live there. That seems to be a huge problem with advocates of “green” this or that. They don’t live there.

I was at an appointment with my surgeon and (being a California kid, 72, and still a kid, haha) asked him if that was his Porsche in the parking lot. With a twinkle in his eye he said, “I have a Tesla.” At a more recent meeting I mentioned the Tesla again and he said, “It drives me, I don’t drive it.” He lives in Des Moines and works in Clarion and he says it is a great stress reliever to sit back and let his car drive him around.

I can’t imagine the stress of cutting peoples’ legs off and gluing new joints in there. There is not one second where I am jealous of his wealth or don’t admire his skill.

Another one I admire is Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota, who thinks adoption of electrified vehicles will not happen as quickly as the totalitarian politicians wish. To say Toyoda knows more about vehicles than any politician is the understatement of the year. It is so sad that he risks being branded some sort of heretic at the altar of wacko science. It makes it all the more admirable that he goes out on that staunch limb.

When Tesla began, I pretty much hated Elon Musk. The guy, I don’t know, but any company that depends on government subsidies… well, you know me. Tesla’s subsidies have run out and they are still there. Only the rich can afford one. So what? Musk has proven his worth recently in the Twitter files. The presidency was bought, not won, in the election.

The protection afforded by constitutional restraints should make the purchased presidency not matter at all. But those restraints no longer exist. It’s Wild West Days where the powerful take whatever they want. Note today’s headline: “The White House to Ask Congress to Approve F-16s for Turkey.” General Smedley Butler must be looking down from his heavenly perch saying, “Wow, it’s the racket on steroids.”

U.S. Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler earned the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. He saw up close how private interests finagle their way to huge profits “reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

The racket of war is not so much different from the war on individual freedom being waged by the “green” crazies. The fragile lives in the desert in the path of solar farms, the bats and birds flying into wind farms, and the abused children in the Congo are unnecessary casualties.