New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams says he’s down with raising New Yorker’s already sky high taxes along with firing city employees, including cops—[Asked “where the layoffs would begin,” Adams only repeated, “Everything’s on the table”]—and he’s blaming the Federal government for his budget failures. His statement on that last is the tell-all:
Our insurance policy was the federal government. They’re not paying us[.]
It doesn’t get any clearer than this.
Amid the long and still growing controversy and disconnect between States’ handling of marijuana—viz., State level legalization of marijuana sales both for recreational and medicinal purposes—and Federal law maintaining marijuana trafficking as illegal, one aspect of that controversy keeps getting overlooked.
States often rationalize their legalization of marijuana with the claim that medicinal marijuana is good. This overlooks the fact that marijuana has no more medicinal value than does the opium poppy. There is a growing body of anecdotes that indicate that there can be medicinal value from some of the chemicals in marijuana, just as there is established medical value in some of the chemicals, viz., morphine and codeine, in the opium poppy.
There also, though, is a growing body of evidence that uncontrolled use of marijuana is physiologically and mentally damaging to the users as they become increasingly dependent—emotionally as well as physiologically—on the plant’s drugs. Further, chronic use of the plant appears to lead to damage to still-developing brains (which development continues into a person’s mid-twenties) and to slower developing damage to mature brains.
What really needs to happen is research into marijuana to identify the chemicals and combinations of chemicals in marijuana, if any, that do have medicinal value. Once that research has been done, and specific chemicals’/chemical combinations’ medical value established, then marijuana growing should be licensed just as is opium poppy growing for the medicinal value of some of its chemicals. The marijuana chemicals/combinations with medical value then should be marketable as prescription drugs for particular medical uses, just as poppies’ prescription-required drugs, are.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R, TN) is bent on impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his palpable, and dangerous, failure to perform. This is, at best, a fool’s errand since the votes don’t exist in the Senate to get even a serious trial, much less a conviction.
I have a better idea, because of course I do.
Instead of wasting time on impeaching Mayorkas, Green, and the House at large, should exercise the House’s Constitutional control over government spending and move to cancel all funding for much of the Department of Homeland Security until Mayorkas and his Deputy and Assistant Secretaries are gone and the Department has materially improved its performance related to keeping illegal aliens from entering our nation.
Specific DHS agencies that should receive full, if not increased, funding include these:
All the other agencies—and there are 16 more of them, including such strongly overlapping agencies as the Management Directorate, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Partnership and Engagement, and the Office of Public Affairs (there’s a hint there regarding how bloated the Department has become)—should have their funding zeroed out.
Further, the House should refuse to pass any DHS-related bill that does not include these funding reductions.
In the wake of repeated Houthi terrorists’ rocket, missile, and drone attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden approaches to the Sea, BP has decided to abandon (BP is saying it’s a “pause”) this shorter and cheaper route and instead to go around Africa altogether to get to the Mediterranean Sea and to ports in Europe. Maersk has already made that decision; other shippers will follow, I predict.
BP’s statement, in part:
The safety and security of our people and those working on our behalf is BP’s priority. We will keep this precautionary pause under ongoing review, subject to circumstances as they evolve in the region.
The safety and security of commercial shipping in international shipping lanes also is the claimed purpose of the US Navy’s Freedom of Navigation operations, wherein our Navy often sails the sea lines of communication, often explicitly sailing contested routing through international waters. Simply sailing through, though, without doing anything other than being momentarily present, doesn’t accomplish much, as the terrorists’ actions in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are so clearly demonstrating.
Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is pretending to be trying to establish a coalition to protect trade through the Red Sea, but in the meantime, he’s not allowing the Navy to do anything more than shooting at those rockets, missiles, and drones that a couple of its ships can reach after those weapons already have been fired. Biden is not allowing our Navy to take overt and aggressive action to prevent those weapons from being launched in the first place. He’s not, for instance, allowing our Navy to destroy the Houthi’s launch sites throughout Houthi occupied Yemen, much less respond reactively to destroy those facilities involved in a particular attack.
Nor is he allowing our Navy to destroy Iran’s Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman ports, thereby seriously limiting Iran’s ability to supply the terrorists in Yemen.
Regarding his pretend coalition effort, Biden isn’t even working with Saudi Arabia in their effort to defeat the Houthi terrorists and restore the government of Yemen, which currently is resident in Saudi Arabia.
For those who object to the US acting as, spending treasure and equipment to be, the world’s policeman, what’s going on in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is a clear and present demonstration of what happens with a President too timid to act, of what happens when we stop being the world’s policeman.
The US needs to act, whether other nations have the courage to do so or not. If we act, they will follow, or if they don’t, we still will have acted. And we don’t have to extend as much support as we do to those nations happy to freeload off our efforts or too timid to act themselves, even in concert with us. The spending on that support can be reallocated to our policeman role.
An atmospheric CO2 removal technology is gaining interest.
In western Texas, a major carbon removal plant that is under construction also recently got a $550 million investment from BlackRock. Once it is up and running in 2025, the plant will use fan-like devices roughly the size of tennis courts to pull carbon from the air and bury it underground, a process known as direct-air capture.
To the extent that this is a good idea—and I’m not convinced that it is—such direct-air capture facilities would be better placed in targeted locations, rather than being randomly situated. And few places are more random than the wide-open spaces of West Texas. That location may be OK for a proof of concept run, but….
If this technology works at scale, the facilities would be better placed just downwind of gas-, oil-, and coal-fired power generation plants to capture CO2 emissions as they are emitted and before they get diffused throughout the atmosphere.
Also: rather than burying the captured CO2, better to freeze it and use the dry ice for shipping perishables, since shipping times will be much longer with the sailing ships and horse-drawn overland wagons that will be the core of our shipping industry after the Left’s war on fossil-fuels is over.
And then recapture that CO2 for recycling….