A Tough Move to Make

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The headline poses the question:

Harris Doesn’t Campaign on Her Gender. Is That a Sign of Progress?

Hillary Clinton did, overtly and zealously, when she ran for President on the Progressive-Democratic Party ticket in 2016. That didn’t run out well for her, but her failure was far more a result of her being a lousy and openly arrogant candidate than it was a function of her running on her sex.

Harris’ decision to eschew running on her sex could have been a sign of progress as the headline alludes. She also isn’t campaigning on her race, for all that there was a brief back and forth with former-President and Republican Presidential campaign over her variously self-identifying as black [via Jamaica] or Indian, and that could have been a sign of progress, also.

However.

Against the backdrop of Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden’s having selected her as his running mate explicitly because she was black and a woman—what many termed, for good or ill, a diversity hire—either of those would have been a tough sell to make independently of her origin as Vice President.

The touting would have been too likely to have been taken as sexist and racist—just as Biden was accused for his selection criteria.

Minerals and Net Zero

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McKinsey & Company, the high pockets consulting company, has expressed concern regarding the Climate Funding Industry’s net zero by 2050 goal and the minerals available to achieve it. This particular concern is buried well down in the report.

Raw materials. Demand for critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, is expected to surge, but current supply is only about 10 to 35 percent of what would be needed by 2050. This is a Level 2 challenge, where supply would need to be scaled, alongside managing demand for such minerals.

McKinsey defines a Level 2 challenge as one that

require[s] the deployment of known technologies to accelerate, and for associated infrastructure and inputs to be scaled.

One of the problem here, though, is that mining minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths is an immensely toxic operation, both in producing and handling these raw minerals and in the collateral production and handling of the hugely toxic mining tailings that are inextricably associated with the mining process. Those tailings, too, while not precisely forever chemicals, do last a very long time and are subject to leaching out of whatever supposedly sealed off storage area they might be in, whether from long-term deterioration of the isolation materials or from human error (vis., EPA’s failure with the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO).

Then there’s the end-of-life disposal of the materials and devices containing these minerals when those materials and devices have worn out or failed. The minerals are still in those devices, they’re still toxic, and we still don’t have the technologies needed adequately to handle that waste.

Then there are the intermediate steps of…assembling…those minerals into the finished net zero-supporting products. They’re toxic to handle there, too, for all that they’re much more easily handled safely than while digging them out of the ground and processing them into usable form.

And that bit about managing demand—that sounds akin to managing third world demand for fossil fuels, too—they shouldn’t have any; they should be consigned to poverty, or the rest of us consigned to poverty forking over the trillions of dollars it would take to prop them up.

Much of that mining, too, is done with child and other slave labor, but that’s really a side issue in this context. It would be straightforward enough to force an end to that, if only by mining elsewhere with legitimate labor forces and technologies. The switch needs only political will and actual sincerity, vice virtue signaling, on the part of the Climate Funding Industry members.

It seems we can’t get there from here (never minding that we really don’t need to).

Oops.

 

H/t Watt’s Up With That

Harris’ Closing Argument

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made her closing argument Tuesday on the Ellipse, hoping the location would emphasize the irony and contrast in comparison with former-President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech there on 6 January 2021. The irony is lost, though, when you recall that Trump, in that speech, called on his supporters to protest peacefully at the Capitol and that the rioters there were a tiny few compared to the thousands on the Ellipse who listened to his speech—and that those rioters had begun gathering at the Capitol before Trump gave his speech.

That’s a minor point regarding Harris’ closing “argument.” The high points of her speech are these:

Trump is a bad man, Evil incarnate. She spent several minutes on this.

Harris has a to-do list. That list was largely devoid of how she would enact any particularly item, it even lacked specificity of what many of those items actually might be. She did promise price controls, though, in the form of punishing businesses for what she calls price gauging, but which have been price increases caused by the several inflation-spiking policies and regulations she and her boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, enacted in the first few months of their administration and expanded on over the last three-and-a-half years. She did, though, make explicit her price control plan to cap drug prices.

Her to-do list also included these inflation-driving items: $25,000 to each first-time home buyer and increasing even further her tax credits for families with children.

She tried to contrast Trump’s security policies with her own, non-specific plans, terming Trump in another of her “bad man” claims a threat to global security. She tried to slide past the security our nation, and our friends and allies, enjoyed during his last term—no wars at all, and the Abraham Peace Accords in the Middle East.

This is in contrast with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration’s panic-ridden abandonment of Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly naked threats to conquer the Republic of China, Iran’s nearby nuclear weapon breakout, and open warfare by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists on Israel, a war aided and abetted, and entered into, by Iran. And there’s the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden situation, a situation in which her administration’s policy has functionally surrendered those waters to Houthi terrorists via this administration’s determinedly ineffective tit-for-tat responses to Houthi missile and drone attacks all along what used to be a busy route for commercial shipping.

Most of her to-do list, most of her policies, were left unspecified, unclarified, vague. This gloss-over was deliberate: her policies are ill-defined in her own mind.

There are a couple of exceptions to that last, though. She fully intends to support eliminating altogether the Senate filibuster so she can convert our nation to one-party rule. She fully intends to support revamping (I can’t call it reforming) our Supreme Court so she can convert it from its Constitutional role of coequal branch and check on the other two branches into a rubber stamp court supporting whatever her one-party government wants to do.

This is not someone whom we can afford running our nation. Nor is the Party she heads.

Harris’ Immigration Policy

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate, and Border Czar, Kamala Harris’ immigration policy has accomplished much. Lockland, OH, Mayor Mark Mason:

Our county officials estimate that we have around 3,000 of those [illegal aliens] that have come to a village of 3,420 residents. And our complaint is, if the federal government is going to have an open borders policy, with that they need to have a policy directing these immigrants to communities that can absorb that kind of population increase[.]

And

Village Administrator Doug Wehmeyer told Fox News Digital recently that it is leading to around $150,000 in losses for the village, as the illegal immigrants do not pay taxes and are displacing local residents who are moving out of those apartments.

Except that, with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration having created the problem, it isn’t really possible to count on that administration to fix the problem. Have a policy directing illegal aliens? The administration has one, and it’s executing on it. Nor Biden nor Harris care a fig about the communities they’re flooding with these illegal aliens.

Mason again:

If you’re going to let immigrants just come over freely, you’ve got to educate them on the cultural differences in how things operate here and make them understand that some of the things that maybe you’re used to in Mauritania [isn’t] necessarily acceptable here in the United States[.]

Assimilate newcomers, whether immigrants or illegal aliens, into American culture? That’s racist according to the Left.

This flooding of Lockland and the associated decision to not bother with assimilation efforts, is an example of the depth of the destruction Harris’ immigration policy has succeeded in accomplishing.

Wait—she was Vice President, not President. True enough, but as VP and as Border Czar, she had enormous influence over the Progressive-Democrat President’s decisions. She agreed with them rather than argued against them.

Fundamentally Transform America

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That’s what ex-President Barack Obama (D) bragged was about to occur shortly before his 2008 election victory. He got a major step of that transformation when he nationalized roughly one-sixth of our economy with his nationalization of our health care coverage industry with his Obamacare.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party is on the verge of finishing the transformation as they sit on the knife’s edge of a sweeping election victory next week. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial headline lays it out:

[Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala] Harris has already endorsed President Biden’s plan to impose “ethics” rules on the Justices that would invite political harassment and compromise judicial independence. Now she won’t disavow packing the Court. She has called for Democrats, if they keep the Senate in November, to bypass the 60-vote filibuster rule, letting them enact such bills without even a modicum of compromise.

Those would be the final two straws in the destruction of our federated republican democracy form of government. It would be the institution of one-party rule, with the minority party not even a loyal opposition but merely irrelevant, and the conversion of our Supreme Court and of our Federal judiciary in general from its current status as an independent, coequal check on the power of the central government into a rubber stamp of Party decisions.

The WSJ editors aren’t given to hyperbole, and they’re not being hyperbolic in their closing paragraph.

Democrats are serious. They say Mr Trump is a threat to democracy and US institutions, while they’re pledging to restructure the judiciary wholesale. Do they notice the cognitive dissonance? Apparently not. But voters might.

That’s what’s at stake next week.