AOC grabbed headlines recently, claiming the world will end in 12 years if climate change is not addressed vigorously. An op-ed piece in today's NY Post by Bjorn Lomborg refutes this. To show he's not right wing, I'll start with quotes from late in the article: "... We should instead embrace ingenuity and innovation and spend far more on green-energy research and development. If we push the price of green energy below fossil fuels through innovation, everyone will switch..." "We need to make sure our solution doesn’t cost more than the problem. If we look at the science and stop believing the end of the world is nigh, our decisions will be much smarter." Here are facts he lays out: Since 1990 the cost associated with extreme weather worldwide has actually declined to 0.25% of global gross domestic product from 0.30%... hurricane damage today costs about 0.04% of global GDP. By 2100, even if hurricanes get twice as bad as they are now, increased prosperity and resilience mean the cost will have halved to 0.02% of GDP... In the 1920's extreme weather killed about half a million people annually. Now, despite there being four times as many people, it kills fewer than 20,000 each year. Once again, kudos, sir. If only other liberals practiced such common sense.
Channel 14-1, a PBS affiliate on over the air antennas in NYC, continues to come up big. At 9PM it runs European crime shows, subtitled, commercial free. Several are quite good. Last night's fare was a Dutch movie, W. - Killer of Flanders Field. It reprises the main character from Witse, which filmed 117 episodes, none of which I've seen. The commissioner has now been retired two years. He is visited by his sister, from whom he has been estranged for 30 years. Unbeknownst to him, she had a child out of wedlock and gave it up for adoption. 29, the young woman is one of the victims. The mother asks her kin's help in finding justice. Since the serial killer theme is so played out, I usually opt out, but I was captured by how grounded and realistic the film was/is. Similar to Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the psychological effects of the hunt on the investigator is central to the narrative. Hubert Damen is excellent as the cop who is far too old for such a case. Although I anticipated the ending, outside of the usual resolution, I was impressed that the writer, Ward Hulselmans, went there and that the producers allowed it. He wrote 80 episodes of the series. 319 users at IMDb have rated W..., forging to a consensus of 6.1 on a scale of ten, too low in my opinion, although I understand that some folks would be turned off by its grimness. There is a lot of creepy talk about sex in online communication. The violence occurs off-screen. It runs only 90 minutes. Here's the star in character:
I set up shop on Bay Parkway today, which allowed me to sit in the car for a bit to warm up, as there wasn't much sunshine while I was there. My thanks to the folks who bought books in Russian, and to the young man who purchased the thick Walt Disney bio.
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