Monthly Archives: June 2024

One More Reason…

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The Environmental Protection Agency is turning more and more into a Progressive-Democratic Party agenda protection agency and less and less devoted to protecting our environment. Recall that the EPA has been busily using some of its Inflation Reduction Act funding allocation to fund an outfit backing anti-Israel protests. It turns out that the EPA is using another tranche of its IRA allocation to fund groups that oppose immigration enforcement. The EPA received $3 billion for Environmental and Climate Justice block grants.

Here’s what the EPA is doing with those dollars:

EPA tapped Fordham University as a grantmaker to distribute $50 million, in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) and the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ).

Aside from those agencies having nothing to do with climate, as the WSJ‘s editors note (I note, also, that climate is only peripherally related to the EPA’s environment DOC), the NYIC (at the least) sees its immigration role as one of defunding and getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This is just one more reason to abolish the EPA altogether and return its personnel, from Secretary on down to the janitors, to the private sector.

We do need an agency of some sort to protect the environment, but not this one, which is so badly damaged that it cannot be rehabilitated. The replacement needn’t be a huge and sprawling agency devoted to pseudo-science (atmospheric CO2 is more pollutant than plant food?), and so what’s used for the EPA’s budget needn’t be so monstrously huge, either. The difference could even be used to pay down some small part of the debt the Progressive-Democratic Party has been inflicting on our federal government.

Maybe…

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California has been getting plenty of rain for a couple of years—the State even has declared its drought over—and so reservoirs are nearly full and aquifers are refilling.

However.

…many farmers in Central Valley, America’s fruit and vegetable basket, will get just 40% of the federal water they are supposed to this year.
Why? Endangered fish.

The problem, to the extent it’s a legitimate problem (spoiler: it isn’t), is that those reservoirs and aquifers are in northern California, and the Central Valley…isn’t. That water must pass through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to get to the Central Valley. Fish swim in the Delta, though, including some that are on the Endangered Species Act’s lists.

California’s environmentalists have functional control over the Delta, and they insist that fish are more important than food.

And downstream fallout—here’s just one example:

The nonprofit Latino Equity, Advocacy & Policy is converting a former cantaloupe and asparagus plant into a center to teach new work skills.

Maybe California’s farmers should look hard at eschewing planting for one year; leave their fields, en masse, to lie fallow. Alternatively, look into leasing their farm fields for that year (or longer if the deal works well enough) to ranchers to graze their herds. Either of these would be good for the fields, too.

Let California’s environmentalistas and regulators live without California’s farm crops for an extended period of time.

The rest of us need to move to reclaim the US Bureau of Reclamation and get it back under control or entirely rescinded and its employees, top to bottom, returned to the private sector.

RFK Jr’s National Defense Plan

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Third party Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, now is promising to cut our national defense spending by 50% if he’s elected.

I will push for [a] 50% reduction in military expenditures in my first four years in office, with more cuts to come thereafter. A way to keep the dollar strong is to keep the country strong. We can do that by redirecting our bloated military budget toward infrastructure, education, and health, and building our economy and building small business.

Kennedy insists, instead, that the United States should

project strength through moral leadership and strong economics.

What would this Kennedy have us do, though, when our arming-up enemies—Russia, People’s Republic of China, Iran, among others—come with actual guns and bullets and destruction and killing. Does he expect our remaining armed forces to defend our nation by throwing copies of Aristotle’s Nicomachean or Eudemian Ethics at them? Or perhaps Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations? Maybe Summa Theologiae, the compendium of St Thomas Acquinas’ writings? All nine volumes—there’s some heavy artillery. Or something both older and more current, the Christian Bible, which contains—rapid fire, now—Judaism’s Torah.

How strong does Kennedy think our economy would be when moralizing in the face of bullets fails to persuade?

Does he really think our infrastructure, education, and health really will matter when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our economy and small businesses will be for our benefit when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our dollar will matter when the currency in effect is that of our conquerors?

Kennedy badly misunderstands the parable of the mouse and the owl: the mouse thinks the owl’s ways are wrong, while the owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

This is Why

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Leave aside the minor fact that embryos differentiate into boys and girls in important ways that are irreversible at any time later in life.

This table, which compares some swimming times of American high school boys with those of the world’s adult women, makes plain the utter insanity of letting post-pubescent biological males compete in biological girls’ sports, purely from a simple competitiveness standpoint.

It’s important to note that US high school boys still swim in yards, while the world’s adult women swim in meters. The original table was pulled from Powerline because many commenters emphasized that distance discrepancy.

Here, though, are some of the women’s times converted for distances in yards:

50 meters Freestyle vs 54.7 yards (50m): women’s world record time shortened to 50 yards swum: 21.64 seconds, a nearly 12% difference favoring the boys

100 meters Back vs 109.4 yards: women’s world record time shortened to 100 yards: 52.51 seconds, a nearly 15% difference favoring the boys

400 meters Free Relay vs 437.4 yards: women’s world record time shortened to 400 yards: 3.18 minutes, a nearly 10% difference favoring the boys

As is plain, shortening the women’s swimming distances to match the high school boys’ distances (and assuming the 9%-ish shorter distance would shorten the women’s times only linearly), US high school boys still swim much faster than the adult women of the world.

 

h/t Powerline

A Progressive-Democrat Governor and a Surtax

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Phil Murphy once promised to let the State’s 2.5% surtax on businesses with incomes greater than $1 million expire and then, by implication, to leave it alone. He did the first part, and it did expire. But it turns out he dissembled on the second part.

Mr Murphy and his [Progressive-]Democratic Legislature are scrambling for money even though tax revenue has increased 35% over the past five years—faster than inflation.
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Mr Murphy now wants to re-impose it on income above $10 million, retroactively to the start of this year.

Progressive-Democrats are so addicted to taxing Americans and our businesses that their promises to lower taxes or to leave alone existing taxes are worthless. Which calls into question the value of any other of their promises. Indeed, their addiction is so powerful that they’re not capable even of saying the words “cut spending,” much less actually doing so.

Maybe Murphy’s renewed surtax will hit only the wealthiest businesses, many based in other states, hard enough to persuade those in New Jersey to relocate to more business—and average American—friendly locations and persuade those based in other States to reduce or forgo doing business in New Jersey.