New York Lynch Mob

I had dinner last night in El Quijote, a wonderful Spanish restaurant next to the fabled Hotel Chelsea.  Although I work one day a week in New York City, I rarely spend time there because my wife and I prefer our neighborhood in the Kingston-Woodstock-Saugerties-Phoenicia corridor in the eastern Catskill Mountains.  Because my cousin was visiting, though, I took a bus down, and we had a nice dinner in Chelsea. 

I came early and had a martini at the bar, when a young man, probably around 30, walked in and ordered a drink.  He told me that he is an unemployed piano worker, and he used to work in the Steinway piano factory.  I happen to have grown up near the original Steinway factory in Astoria, Queens, and we got into a conversation.  

I suggested that he consider moving to North Dakota, where the jobs are plentiful.  Truck drivers in North Dakota are making $80,000, according to the Bismarck Tribune, and a Williston politician has told me that people who get off the bus in Willistion, which is in western North Dakota, find a job within six hours.  The reason, of course, is the oil boom brought on by hydraulic fracturing, fracking, and horizontal drilling.  These technologies involve going down two miles into the earth, then turning the drill at a 90 degree angle, horizontally. High-pressure water mixed with a chemical solution breaks up the shale rock and releases oil or natural gas.  

According to Hannah Coman,* since fracking was invented in the 1940s, there have been about a million fracking applications with about 1,000 reported cases in the five states where fracking has occurred, Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In other words, fracking is safer than driving a car. 

That is, the five states where fracking has occurred have a combined population of 36.6 million, according to the 2010 census, so there’s a probability of .027% (1,000/36,600,000) of an incident.  In contrast, there were 6.4 million car accidents in 2005 compared to 208 million licensed drivers in 2008. The median age was 37.2, and assuming a starting age for driving of 18, Americans experienced about 19.2 x 6.4 million = 125 million car accidents over their 19.2 driving years; 125 million / 208 million is a 60% probability.  In other words, car accidents are 2,222% more likely than fracking accidents. 

Nevertheless New Yorkers are convinced, undoubtedly by the media, that fracking is a great evil.  Most don't know what it is or why it's evil. They just know that it's evil. 

When the young man asked me why there were so many jobs, I said that there was a great deal of oil extraction because of the fracking in North Dakota.  He suddenly went ballistic, and he started screaming at me: "I will NEVER be involved with fracking. Fracking is evil. I hate fracking."  I suggested that he do a little reading on the subject, and he answered, "I've read on it . You should read on it."  I asked him whether he had learned about it from Youtube video or The New York Times. He didn't respond. I added, "OK, I'll remember you as the guy who preferred unemployment to fracking." 

I then sat down with my aunt, to whom I described this interaction. "I hate fracking," she said. I don't think that she could cite a clear reason either.  

New York is a city in which the City Council has called Wal-Mart's donations to charity "dangerous dollars" and "toxic money." It is a city governed by a lynch-mob mentality, where conformity to national socialist** rumors is a rule, a cornerstone of a culture governed by lockstep, illiteracy-inducing public schools, which indoctrinate the city's population in the city's national socialist ideology.  Never mind that fracking has been done for 70 years; never mind that natural gas has always been obtained using fracking. Fracking is evil, according to  New York's national socialists. 

New York has become a place that I'd rather avoid. The people, indoctrinated and intolerant, don't interest me;  the politics upsets me.  The food is good, but I'm past the age at which I can afford the calories. When the jury comes in on the outcome of the Fed's recent tripling of the money supply, I don't think I want to be anywhere near New York City. I can envision the city's national socialists hoisted by their own petard, blaming George W. Bush for all their own bad decisions.

*Hannah Coman, “Balancing Our Needs for Energy and Clean Water: The Case for Applying Strict Liability in Hydraulic Fracturing Suits.”

**In popular American parlance, followers of Hegel and the German historical school of economics had been called "liberals" and now call themselves "progressives." Neither term is accurate. They are national socialists, with the same intellectual heritage that Hitler's Nazi Party had.