Monthly Archives: November 2021

Progressive-Democrat Strikes Again

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Austria is locking up down into their homes all Austrian citizens who remain unvaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.

World renowned epidemiologist and Progressive-Democrat Arne Duncan, late Secretary of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Education Department, says that’s a good idea.

If you [sic] a danger to yourself and others, you must remain at home. If you aren’t, you are free to roam around the country. Austria is onto something…

Then he closed his deal with this:

I look forward to the day when we Americans value the health, safety, and well-being of our neighbors at least as much as we value our personal freedom.

Those pesky freedoms. How they do get in the way of our Know Betters telling us how to live our lives. For our own good, of course.

Duncan’s position, the core ideology of the Progressive-Democratic Party, is a clear illustration that our safety and well-being, along with those of our neighbors, are at greatest risk when we lose those personal freedoms.

The Left and their Party know this full well, which is why they’re at such pains to disparage our personal freedoms.

Build Back Better is Good

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Jason Furman, ex-Chairman of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) White House Council of Economic Advisers and currently a Harvard Professor of something styled “Practice,” is all about the Biden-Harris reconciliation collection of policies known as Build Back Better.

He even wrote this in all seriousness in his piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Build Back Better would have a minuscule impact on inflation over the medium and long term.

Even were that true, though, in the short term where most of us live, especially the lower middle class and poor among us who live especially short-term—paycheck to paycheck—we’re facing not just inflation, which is a rate, but actual steady-state higher prices; higher prices which will last into Furman’s medium and long terms, and beyond.

Meanwhile, wages won’t rise fast enough to reduce those higher prices to the status quo ante‘s buying power any time soon, leaving our lower middle class and poor worse off in Furman’s medium and longer term, and beyond.

That wage rise, further, will be held back by Biden-Harris’ and Progressive-Democrats’ penchant for regulation, which will hinder the rise in productivity that’s necessary to facilitate wages’ rise.

Furman knows this full well; he’s one of the Smart Ones of the Left.

Cutting Your Home’s Carbon Footprint

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Alberto Cervantes and Katherine Blunt had a piece on this subject in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s a piece that I can only characterize as virtue-signaling. Their opening paragraph has this:

What does a lower-carbon home look like?… It uses heat pumps for heating and cooling, solar panels and batteries for electricity generation and storage, induction ranges for cooking and chargers for electric vehicles.

What they seem a pains to elide, though, are associated, unavoidable carbon footprints (as always, granting (which I do not, except arguendo) carbon footprints matter) and really nasty pollution.

What is the carbon footprint from the manufacture of heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from mining the raw materials? The carbon footprint from their transformation into the components for those heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from transporting materials from each prior stage of mining and manufacture to the next stage and ultimately to the end-use location?

What about the pollution from mining the ores necessary for these items’ components? The lithium, nickel, cadmium, and other battery metals are especially toxic to mine—and not only the metals, the mining tailings also are strongly polluting.

What about the toxic pollution from disposal of spent batteries—those toxic metals still are in those batteries that no longer work due to the simple nature of batteries aging and fading out of usefulness?

Energy efficiency always is a plus, if only from an economic perspective. But our goal should be energy efficiency, not limits on permitted energy.

We Need It

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One of the arguments Progressive-Democrats are using to rationalize their claimed need to pass their spendiferous reconciliation bill is one being advanced by Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D, MI), this time via a Friday interview with Martha MacCallum on her The Story. Huge spending subsidies for child care is necessary because folks can’t otherwise afford it, so they can’t go back to work.

What Progressive-Democrats refuse to address, though—including Dingell (and MacCallum shied away from asking Dingell about it)—is that pre-pandemic, folks could afford child care, the unemployment rate was solidly below 4%, and the labor force participation rate was two per centage points higher than today.

What’s changed? I mean, besides lockdowns, which we now know was a mistake, yet Progressive-Democrats still demand them, and Progressive-Democrats having gained power and insist on throwing money at an economy that cannot absorb it without historically high inflation.

Not Government Overreach

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Biden-Harris and zir’s Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice’s FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on Project Veritas‘ founder and boss James O’Keefe’s home, searched it, and seized his phones and began searching through the phones. This is separate from the FBI’s raid on the homes of reporters working for Project Veritas.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop extracting data from the phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe days after his home was raided….
…
According to the order, the DOJ must confirm to the court by Friday that it has paused its review of O’Keefe’s phones.

Days after. The FBI has had those days to extract, copy, and paw through the data.

A special master has been appointed by the court to oversee this and to cull the data that the Privacy Protection Act, along with DoJ regulations, explicitly bar Government from seizing from reporters. However, on what basis do we believe the FBI has actually “paused” its review? Even were the phones physically transferred to the possession of this special master, on what basis do we believe that agents this government have stopped pawing through the data they’ve seized? On what basis do we believe those agents of this government have destroyed—or even sequestered—their copies?

Among those data are

confidential and privileged information…of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications

And

reporters’ notes. A lot of…sources unrelated to this story and a lot of confidential donor information to our news organization.

This is not overreach. This is naked abuse of raw power and a deliberate, considered disregard for law, for the liberties and rights of American citizens.

It’s going to be a long three years.

(Aside: what was this stuff doing on a cell phone, anyway? This is taking convenience too far at the expense of security.)