Subsidizing Stupid

I don’t want to buy any windmills and I don’t want to buy any solar panels. Most especially though - I don’t want to pay for other people to buy them either. But my government is taking my money and giving it to them. I don’t like that. I don’t like it one bit. If hippie greenies are foolhardy enough to pay more for their heat and electricity because it’s “green,” they’re free to do that. It would be none of my business as long as I didn’t have to pay for their silliness.
 
I don’t want to buy an electric car either - and I don’t want to pay for other people to buy them. But again, my government is taking my money and giving it to people who manufacture those cars - and more of my money to still other people who buy them. I don’t like that. It annoys me greatly.

There are lots of reasons why windmills don’t cut it as a power source, but the biggest is this: calm days. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Sometimes it doesn’t blow for several days running. Ergo, no electricity. Whatever activities require it are not possible until the wind blows again whenever that may be. Sailboats have the same trouble; that’s why they’re only used for recreation now.

Here’s why solar panels don’t cut it: the sun doesn’t shine at night and days are often cloudy. What do we do on calm, cloudy days? We have to use the good old coal, oil, or natural gas generators. We have to keep that whole infrastructure in place and maintained on calm, cloudy days. Hippie greenies haven’t solved those problems and probably never will, but that doesn’t stop them from voting for “green” politicians who siphon money from my pocket to pay for their ridiculous notions.
 
There’s yet another major problem with windmills: When the wind blows hard for a day or two, the power generated - which the electricity utility is forced by government to buy at above-market rates no less - could burn up the whole grid causing extensive, long-term blackouts! Because of this, Maine utility companies have to spend $1.4 billion to beef up transmissions lines against those windmill surges driving up their transmission rates by 19.6% as of July 1, 2012. Transmission costs are about half my total monthly electric bill here in western Maine. In spite of enormous, long-term government subsidies - money from me and you, that is - windmills remain the most expensive way to generate electricity by far, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate that will ever change.

I have a generator to use when the grid shuts down, but I don’t want to generate my own power because it’s cheaper and more reliable to buy it from Central Maine Power (CMP). However, even when I send checks to CMP each month, much of that money goes to greenies and their windmills. That’s because CMP is forced by government to buy excess power from their windmills whether it’s needed or not and at inflated price as well! That means self-righteous hippie greenies can buy power at market rates when the wind doesn’t blow - and sell it at above-market rates when it does. This infuriates me.

I don’t want ethanol in my gasoline either, but I cannot buy gasoline that doesn’t contain it. Hippie greenies have forced that on me too. Worse, government is making me pay for ethanol even though it costs more than gasoline - and I get less energy from it. I have to pay for its subsidies in my taxes and I have to pay for it again when I pump it into my gas tank. I know government does dumb things, but I especially hate it when it forces me to cooperate in its stupidity. We’ve known since at least 2005 that it takes at least 29% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get from it when you burn it. Worse still, it damages small engines like my chainsaws, lawnmowers, four-wheelers, generators, and every other small gasoline engine most of us have. Can we please, please stop this ethanol craziness? Please?

Maine’s Governor LePage is negotiating with Quebec Hydro to buy cheaper, more reliable electricity, but his biggest opponents are the hippie greenies who want to keep their windmill gravy train rolling here. Since the November election, they’re back in control of Maine’s legislature and likely to thwart LePage’s efforts. Greenies love President Obama because he wasted somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion of taxpayer money on “Green Energy” development, while doing his best to shut down cheaper, more reliable, more dependable sources of energy from fossil fuels.

Looks like I’ll be forced to subsidize all this greenie government foolishness for the next several years at least. Sometimes I wish I were as stupid as they are, because then it wouldn’t all piss me off so much.

Hippie Pizza

After years of nagging from by wife about eating healthier, I’ve begun to tolerate hippie pizza - you know, the kind with little or no meat on top and no tomato sauce at all. Instead, there’s some goat cheese and vegetables of various types, some of which you’ve never heard of before. She promises they’re good for me, which usually means they won’t taste good. If you’re really, really hungry though and there’s nothing else to eat, they’re edible.

My first hippie pizza experience was at a restaurant with a lot of ferns in ceramic pots hanging from the ceiling on macramé straps and with fat candles around. I was very hungry and chowing down my little mini-pizza - an old-fashioned one with pepperoni, tomato sauce and lots of cheese. While I was eating it, my wife offered me a taste of hers several times, but I declined. “It’s very good,” she’d insist, “you should try it.” I’d say no and continue chewing my retro pizza. It wasn’t big enough though and I was still hungry when she stopped eating hers and there were a couple of pieces left. She saw me looking at them and asked, “Now do you want to try it?” I took a few bites and they weren’t bad if I sipped a little wine with them.

My wife and daughters love Flatbread Pizza, a chain of hippie pizza restaurants spreading around New England lately. So far, I’ve only been to North Conway and Portland but I notice patterns. Some customers have matted dreadlocks tucked up inside bulging Grateful-Dead-type knit hats. Others wear Phish-type bandanas tied in the back. Aging hippies prefer the old-style pony tails and few if any hats. They may be bald on top, but enough graying hair still grows on the sides to put an elastic on. Waitresses are skinny vegan women or smiling, Mama-Cass types. Dress is yard sale chick with nothing tucked in. One important difference between my generation of aging baby-boomers and the next group coming up: we tuck in our shirts and they don’t. Younger people want to project the image that they don’t care as much about appearances, taking great pains to select clothing which reflects that.

Most of the waitresses had little tattoos on them. I think there are more tattooed women in their twenties and thirties than men, a reversal from previous generations. I don’t know for sure what the tattoos portrayed because my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t want to put on my reading glasses and stare closely at their arms while they were writing down orders. They might consider that rude. One thing I didn’t see was facial jewelry - no lip studs or rings in nostrils, tongues or eyebrows and that was a blessing. Such ornamentation would be an appetite-suppressant for me and perhaps for some other patrons as well. Shaving legs or armpits is optional but that doesn’t bother me.

Around the Portland restaurant there are children’s drawings hanging on clotheslines resembling Tibetan prayer flags. Tibetans are hip because they’re more in tune with nature and the cosmos than heterosexual Republicans like me. The chairs and benches in Portland are yard-sale-chick too, painted over with different colors in their lifetime with newer layers worn away to reveal older, contrasting layers beneath. I think the message is that it’s better to use recycled wood than cut down trees to make new ones.

The menu proclaims organic vegetables, phosphate-free meats and free-range chicken toppings. The salads are organic, of course, and contain seaweed. It’s an old fisherman joke that when you reel in some seaweed instead of a fish for the dinner plate, someone will say you caught the salad. Well, there it was at Flatbread in Portland. The Pizza arrives on a typical round pizza pan, but the crust is oval-shaped and overlaps on each end. I think they could make it round if they want to but don’t in order to appear nonconformist. They don’t cut it up in the usual way either with the trusty roller blade making diametric cuts into wedges. No, they make one cut lengthwise through the oval and then perpendicular cuts across that, creating little rectangles instead. When the check arrives, it’s clipped on a cedar shingle with an old clothespin. Pretentiously unpretentious.

Flatbread’s website declares that it supports the community and the North Conway restaurant has a reputation for doing that. However, if it’s true that we are what we eat, I fear that if I continue eating there I may start wearing Birkenstocks and signing on with the Green Party. I going to have to load up on phosphates and nitrates when I eat at home just to preserve my way of life.