Monthly Archives: March 2022

Business and Climate Risk

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The Securities and Exchange Commission wants information from our businesses

about their climate risks as it gears up to propose new disclosure requirements on the topic.

In particular (so far):

The SEC requested information from the companies [43 or more US public companies] about significant risks related to climate change. The risks ranged from physical effects such as severe weather to litigation and regulatory compliance costs.

However, the only real risks American businesses face from the claimed climate situation are two. One is from Government regulations as Government men and women overreact to claims of dire climate evolution. Examples of this risk are that litigation and regulatory compliance cost bit and this:

The Biden administration and the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler have made combating climate change and nudging investors to deploy more capital toward greener businesses a priority.

The other risk is from Government men and women using claims of dire consequences of climate evolution to expand bureaucratic power. The SEC’s demands for “climate risk decision-making” data preparatory to issuing related disclosure regulations is an example of this.

Two Examples of Progressive-Democrats’ Assault on Free Speech

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California doesn’t want anyone to contradict the State’s preferred narrative regarding the Wuhan Virus—not even medical experts.

Disagreement with the “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID-19 issues could be deemed “unprofessional conduct” for California doctors.
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The bill, which was cowritten by five other California Assembly and Senate members, goes beyond regulating how California doctors can treat their own patients. It opens their statements about COVID—public or private—to review by the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, with possible sanctions to follow.

This bill doesn’t care about disagreeing science. Medical opinion doesn’t matter unless it’s the State’s opinion. There is no Truth but Truth, and State is its name.

Illinois is joining the assault.

“Though the Illinois State Police respects the rights of citizens to express their opinions in a lawful manner, there is great concern with any event that is designed to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic,” ISP Division of Patrol Colonel Margaret McGreal said in a statement. “Traffic backups are a major contributing cause to traffic crashes which lead to property damage, personal injury, and even death. A planned event designed to impede normal traffic flow is dangerous to the innocent motoring public.”

There might be a problem—which the State government will define to be illegal after the fact, or will define preemptively, as convenient—so truckers shouldn’t speak up with their convoy protest. And they’re not even honking their horns.

This is Just Dumb

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President Joe Biden (D) says there are only two alternatives vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

You have two options. Start a Third World War, go to war with Russia physically. Or two, make sure that a country that acts so contrary to international law ends up paying a price for having done it[.]

Biden-Harris went on to admit that sanctions can have no immediate effect.

Leave aside the simple fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to “pay a price;” he’ll still have Ukraine after ponying up.

No, the problems here are two. One is that effects of sanctions that take effect (maybe) at some time in a nebulous future do Ukraine no good in the present with Ukrainian men, women, and children dying now. Ukraine—soldiers and civilians alike—is fighting for its survival against Russia as the latter’s soldiers invade and kill now. Biden knows this.

The other problem is that there is at least one additional alternative: sending serious arms, ammunition, and training in serious quantities to the Ukrainian military. So far, what Biden—and the weak European government men and women—are delivering is insultingly limited quantities: the ammunition amounts, for instance, that they deign transfer are good only for a few days.

A bonus alternative: cyber attacks against Russian government-military communications. Hacks into Russian financial facilities to completely drain (or simply to completely corrupt) the financial holdings of Putin and his oligarch cronies and of the officers and their civilian counterparts of the General Staff of the Russian Defense Ministry.

Interested readers can think of more. It’s appalling that Biden-Harris cannot. Or chooses not to.

Another Judge Gets One Right

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Recall that the Fairfax County School Board, last year, changed the admissions policy for its elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology from one of straight merit to one of discrimination to favor some racially preferred children and to disfavor some racially…not preferred…children. This racist policy was objected to in court by a broad coalition of average American residents of the county. In US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Claude Hilton waved the racism flag and struck the racial preferences scheme.

Hilton ruled in part [citations omitted, emphasis added],

The Board’s main problem is its focus on the goal to have TJ [Thomas Jefferson] reflect the demographics of the surrounding area, described primarily in racial terms. Far from a compelling interest, racial balancing for its own sake is “patently unconstitutional.” The Board cannot transform racial balancing into a compelling interest “simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity.'” The school districts in Parents Involved tried various verbal formulations to deflect from their intent to racially balance schools through race-based transfers. The Board here did not even bother with such “verbal formulations.” Board members and high-level FCPS [Fairfax County Public Schools] actors did not disguise their desire for TJ to represent the racial demographics…. Whether accomplished overtly or via proxies, racial balancing is not a compelling interest.

And

…steps…could have been implemented before the Board defaulted to a system that treats applicants unequally in hopes of engineering a particular racial outcome.

And

The proper remedy for a legal provision enacted with discriminatory intent is invalidation.

We may be making progress toward correcting the blatantly racist policies of the Left.

The ruling can be read here.