Even an occasional windfarm. Or, as Alisa remarks, a field of oil wells–on land that’s good for nothing else.

But having spent time next door to a single oil well (I mean the pump, of course) in one of just two houses in the flats of eastern Montana, I can tell you that it’s (a) an eyesore and (b) irritatingly non-stop noisy, 24/7.

(It has a lot to do with the physical makeup of the person, and also what he grew up with, I think. When my mother-in-law, a virtually life-long Chicagoan, stayed at the country motel near our farm for a couple of nights before my wedding, she finally said, “How do you stand the never-ending SILENCE!”)

But to my mind, all that stuff is beautiful because of the contrast with woods and farm-fields. Imagine if there were no way to get away from any of it and into the Green that is our native home. Some of us, at least, would literally go bonkers.

Some Objectivist on one of the O’ist boards remarked that the unobstructed horizontals of productive farmland as far as the eye can see had the same effect on him as the verticals of skyscrapers and city buildings and so forth did on so many O’ists.

Exactly.

Doesn’t mentioning semtex and windmills in the same sentence constitute thought-crime these days? I hope you guys are hiding your IPAs.

They can have my Indian Pale Ale when it pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The sad thing is that spending on these things will continue for a while as it would represent too much of a humiliation for certain vested interests to admit that wind power has been an expensive mistake. And of course it is not really about electricity – but what I might call “environmental theatre”.

Let’s play Special Interest MadLibs.

Clearly, [INSERT SCHEME HERE] did not work and that only means that we did not go far enough to effectively impliment [INSERT SCHEME HERE] to get the results we expected. We need more government run regulatory control and taxpayer funding to make sure that [INSERT SCHEME HERE] will eventually work at some point in the future. This failure is all the fault of [INSERT GROUP TO BE VILLIFIED HERE].

Enjoy it then, while it’s still available. It is an endagered species “a landscape without them”

I kind of hope that the construction of these things will stop *because the money has run out*. However, I fear that money will keep being spent on stupid things rather than actually useful things right up to the moment everything collapses, precisely because the actual problem is that all links between what is seen as important and what is actually important (or even useful) has been completely lost.