Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Begging Iran

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The subheadline tells the tale:

Biden administration mounts last-ditch appeal to Tehran, while also pushing to keep cease-fire talks alive

And this from Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock with a very simple message: all parties must refrain from escalation. It’s also critical that we break this cycle by reaching a cease-fire in Gaza.

And this from a carefully unidentified US official:

We’re preparing to defend Israel in an April-like manner[.]

This timidity by our government is only leading to continued deaths of Israeli citizens at the hands of Iran and its terrorist surrogates, and the continued deaths of those Palestinians about whom the Biden-Harris administration pretends so shrilly to be worried, as Iran’s terrorist surrogate Hamas continues to hold Palestinians as shields.

Equating Israel’s struggle to defend itself in a war for its survival against its terrorist attackers with those terrorist attackers is disgustingly, deeply immoral. Defending Israel in an April-like manner, wherein American forces, along with Jordanian and British forces, shot down an important number of the 300+ missiles, rockets, and cruise missiles Iran fired at Israel that April, was sufficiently inadequate that Israel finds itself in a similar strait today.

Purely defensive efforts are wholly inadequate.  Without further second-guessing the Biden-Harris effort last April, what will be necessary today are Rules Two and Three. The US must destroy Hezbollah and Houthi launching facilities, whether or not they’re preparing to launch, along with those terrorists’ missile and rocket storage sites and their ammunition and fuel dumps. The US must go further: our forces must sink the Iranian navy afloat and destroy Iran’s air defense sites and its launch facilities and associated missile and rocket storage sites.

That will leave Israel free to deal with the close-in threats: those rockets, missiles, and cruise missiles that do get through to range of Israel’s defenses, and to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist forces.

In the meantime, though, Hezbollah is firing rockets into northern Israel, killing tens of Israeli men, women, and children, all with no response from the US.

Israel is a critical ally of ours. Either we are a critical ally of Israel, or we are not. The Biden-Harris administration’s activities are not encouraging.

Here’s a Thought

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I do get them on occasion.  The Five Eyes Alliance, consisting of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have issued a report delineating the utter dependence of those nations (and the Western world at large, I add) on the People’s Republic of China for supplies of rare earth elements, elements that are Critical Items in producing a nation’s modern weapons and that are Critic Items in national economies dependent on computers, communications, and infrastructure distribution nodes. That report, DECREASING RARE EARTHS DEPENDENCY: HOW THE FIVE EYES ALLIANCE CAN MINIMISE RARE EARTHS TRADING RISK WITH CHINA (all caps in the original) can be read here.

The report recommended diversify[ing] away from China for the importing of rare earth elements (REEs). The authors proposed this be achieved through “two key policies:”

  • broadening the scope of the Five Eyes Alliance to include increased trade and cooperation on REEs and REEs-dependent goods and services
  • actively seeking alternative sources, whether through new import sources or substitutes for REEs

My thought concerns that last. The Five Eyes, along with the nations rimming the South China Sea, particularly Viet Nam, the Philippines, and the Republic of China, also along with the Republic of Korea and Japan—all of which are even more dependent on rare earth acquisition—should begin actively mining the South China Sea floor, which is rich with rare earth nodules just lying around on the surface of the floor. In support of those mining operations, the Five Eyes’ navies should be prepared to sink PLAN shipping that attempts to interfere with this mining of the sea floor underlying these international waters. If those additional interested nations choose not to participate, the Five Eyes should proceed anyway.

That might seem more confrontational than heretofore, but that’s what we need instead of backpedaling all the time or constantly seeking to accommodate the PRC.

Kamala Harris and a Smattering of History

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proud of her record as California’s Attorney General. Here’s an example from that proud record of hers, against the backdrop of the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s lawfare campaign against their political opponent, former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As AG, Harris demanded nonprofits in her jurisdiction hand over their federal IRS Forms 990 Schedule B so she could pretend to be investigating self-dealing and improper loans involving those organizations and their donors. Her office then promptly “leaked” 2,000 Conservative cause-supporting organizations’ Schedules B to the public via Harris’ Attorney General Web site. Those organizations and their donors then began receiving threats of retaliation and death threats.

It won’t matter that the Supreme Court blew up her California AG case in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta. She’s already shown her disdain of the Court and complete disregard for its rulings; her demand for those Schedules B (much less her release of so many submittals) was in complete disregard of a much earlier, already long-standing Supreme Court NAACP v Alabama ruling which had held that similar demands violated the 1st Amendment’s right freely to associate as a critical aspect of the Amendment’s explicit Free Speech Clause.

Harris will continue Party’s lawfare campaigns against those of whom Party elite personally disapprove. This is the empirical practice and view of “law” that the highly experienced, and proud of that experience, Harris will bring to her administration, including the Department of Justice that she will build during her term.

That’s if we average Americans are foolish enough to elect her.

An Economics Question

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In his op-ed regarding the wholly unbalanced training of today’s economists (because so many of them are not getting any training in price theory), Steven Landsburg, an economics professor at the University of Rochester, wrote that he puts a question to his students, all of whom get the correct answer, and to  variety of smart lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and scientists, nearly all of whom do not.

The question:

Apples are provided by a competitive industry. Pears are provided by a monopolist. Coincidentally, they sell at the same price. You’re hungry and would be equally happy with an apple or a pear. If you care about conserving societal resources, which should you buy?

Landsburg’s answer:

In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs. Under a monopoly, prices usually reflect a substantial markup. So a $1 apple sold by a competitor probably requires almost a dollar’s worth of resources to produce. A $1 pear sold by a monopolist is more likely to require, say, 80 cents worth of resources. To minimize resource consumption, you should buy the pear.

Maybe. Maybe not. The monopolist is unlikely to be using his resources efficiently; competition will drive that producer to maximize efficiency in resource usage. On a per fruit item basis, it may be that the two are using resources the same. Maybe the competitive producer is using fewer resources per fruit item.

The more accurate answer is that there isn’t enough information in the question to provide an answer.