Tag Archives: markets

Facebook Employees and Virtue-Signaling

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Here are a couple of examples, from a batch of leaked Facebook internal emails.

Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer asked employees to “hang in there” as the company figured out its response. “We have been ‘hanging in there’ for years,” one person replied. “We must demand more action from our leaders. At this point, faith alone is not sufficient.” [Emphasis added]

And

“All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” another staffer responded. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

And

“I’m tired of platitudes; I want action items,” another staffer wrote.

And

[Y]et another staffer wrote[,] “History will not judge us kindly.”

And yet, none of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, cared enough about these failures and their claimed inability to do anything about them to resign rather than continue to go along with them.

All of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, plainly care more about their paychecks than they do about their integrity or their morality.

As the New York Post put it in a related piece summarizing The Atlantic article,

Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth has overridden ethical concerns and allowed hate speech and incitements to violence to spread unchecked….

That’s Facebook, from top to bottom, for all the…whining: management’s demand for growth above ethics and employees’ demand for paychecks above ethics.

Biden’s Attack on Our Oil and Gas Industry

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President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate’s hatred of our oil and gas production industry is well known, and he wants to include $6 billion in additional taxes, fees, and fines on those industries in their reconciliation bill.

But those penalties also will explode the cost of a myriad products Americans use, and destroy the availability of too many others—all beyond such petty uses as fuel for our getting to and from work, or heating our homes in winter and cooling them in summer.

Here’s a partial list of those other uses to which our oil and gas production is put. The full list would run to some 6,000 products.

  • asphalt and road oil
  • components for producing chemicals, plastics, and synthetic materials
  • electronics
  • luggage
  • office supplies like ink and pens
  • computer chips
  • paint and paint brushes
  • floor wax
  • safety glasses and regular eye glasses and contacts
  • linoleum
  • caulking
  • roofing
  • curtains
  • electricians tape
  • fertilizer
  • insecticides
  • tires
  • mops
  • rugs and carpets
  • toilet seats
  • pillows (down-filled are much more expensive)
  • upholstery
  • refrigerators
  • dishwasher parts
  • rubbing alcohol
  • aspirin and other medicines
  • heart valves and other medical devices
  • bandages
  • anesthetics
  • surgical masks (never mind their claimed need for Wuhan Virus protection)
  • dentures
  • antiseptics and hand sanitizers
  • antihistamines
  • cortisone
  • artificial limbs
  • clothes
  • hair tinting and dying
  • perfume
  • sunglasses
  • lipstick
  • purses
  • shoes
  • roller skates
  • shampoo
  • deodorant
  • toothpaste and soap
  • balloons
  • tents
  • fishing rods
  • footballs
  • football cleats and helmets
  • golf balls
  • parachutes
  • telephones
  • cameras
  • candles
  • drinking cups

Of course, Progressive-Democrats know all of this. They also know that wind, solar, even nuclear sources will produce none of these.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

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Here’s another example.

Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade, plans to hand out Wuhan Virus relief funds (which the State styles “COVID-19” relief funds) to businesses based on the race of the business’ owners. Stephen Collins, Resort Meeting Source owner and represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, is suing the State over that.

Federal Judge William Martinez issued a temporary restraining order barring the OEDIT from acting on the discriminatory release of funds pending final adjudication of the matter in his court.

[H]e found that Collins was likely to prevail in the lawsuit because the Colorado law at issue “expressly requires OEDIT to prioritize minority-owned businesses in distributing grants under the Disproportionately Impacted Business Grant Program” and because “the process for qualifying as a disproportionately impacted business differs for minority-owned and non-minority-owned businesses.”

The lie(s):

OEDIT…forward[ed] two legal documents to Fox News. The office filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Wednesday, claiming that “race played no role in OEDIT’s funding decisions.”
OEDIT also filed a declaration from Michael Landes, director of OEDIT’s Opportunity Zone Program. Landes claimed that racial preferences will only come into account after all other criteria have been adjudicated.

[R]ace played no role—OEDIT is calling the judge a liar, or OEDIT is violating the State’s law requiring exactly that.

[R]acial preferences will only come into account after….  Landes calls himself a liar: either race played no role or it played a role after all other criteria. Landes calls himself a liar a second time: racial preferences will only come into account after—either racial preferences are being acted on, or they are not. When they’re being acted on doesn’t matter.

Dismissive Disingenuousness

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Recall that some Alaskan-harvested fish, 26 million pounds of them, had been stranded in eastern Canada, just a few hundred yards from American fish-processing plants, because President Joe Biden’s (D) Customs and Border Protection managers threatened $41 million in penalties on fish handlers if those fish moved down a 100 yard railroad line into Maine, as the Jones Act explicitly allows.

Biden’s CBP managers decided that those 100 yards didn’t satisfy the Act (or Biden’s and those managers’ whims) after decades of the ride having been entirely satisfactory.

Federal Judge Sharon Gleason issued a temporary injunction against those and any further CBP penalties, allowing the fish to move.

What’s telling about this incident, though, is this statement that the Biden-Harris administration argued in court [emphasis added]:

…an injunction wasn’t needed, because food supply chains had already begun to adjust. “Within days of CBP issuing notices of penalties in this matter the movement of Russian-origin frozen seafood from the Bayside facility began.”

Maybe this isn’t dismissiveness or disingenuousness. Maybe it’s more of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s collusion with Russia.

Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

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Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.