Category Archives: culture

Progressive-Democrat Strikes Again

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Austria is locking up down into their homes all Austrian citizens who remain unvaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.

World renowned epidemiologist and Progressive-Democrat Arne Duncan, late Secretary of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Education Department, says that’s a good idea.

If you [sic] a danger to yourself and others, you must remain at home. If you aren’t, you are free to roam around the country. Austria is onto something…

Then he closed his deal with this:

I look forward to the day when we Americans value the health, safety, and well-being of our neighbors at least as much as we value our personal freedom.

Those pesky freedoms. How they do get in the way of our Know Betters telling us how to live our lives. For our own good, of course.

Duncan’s position, the core ideology of the Progressive-Democratic Party, is a clear illustration that our safety and well-being, along with those of our neighbors, are at greatest risk when we lose those personal freedoms.

The Left and their Party know this full well, which is why they’re at such pains to disparage our personal freedoms.

Cutting Your Home’s Carbon Footprint

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Alberto Cervantes and Katherine Blunt had a piece on this subject in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s a piece that I can only characterize as virtue-signaling. Their opening paragraph has this:

What does a lower-carbon home look like?… It uses heat pumps for heating and cooling, solar panels and batteries for electricity generation and storage, induction ranges for cooking and chargers for electric vehicles.

What they seem a pains to elide, though, are associated, unavoidable carbon footprints (as always, granting (which I do not, except arguendo) carbon footprints matter) and really nasty pollution.

What is the carbon footprint from the manufacture of heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from mining the raw materials? The carbon footprint from their transformation into the components for those heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from transporting materials from each prior stage of mining and manufacture to the next stage and ultimately to the end-use location?

What about the pollution from mining the ores necessary for these items’ components? The lithium, nickel, cadmium, and other battery metals are especially toxic to mine—and not only the metals, the mining tailings also are strongly polluting.

What about the toxic pollution from disposal of spent batteries—those toxic metals still are in those batteries that no longer work due to the simple nature of batteries aging and fading out of usefulness?

Energy efficiency always is a plus, if only from an economic perspective. But our goal should be energy efficiency, not limits on permitted energy.

Not Government Overreach

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Biden-Harris and zir’s Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice’s FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on Project Veritas‘ founder and boss James O’Keefe’s home, searched it, and seized his phones and began searching through the phones. This is separate from the FBI’s raid on the homes of reporters working for Project Veritas.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop extracting data from the phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe days after his home was raided….
…
According to the order, the DOJ must confirm to the court by Friday that it has paused its review of O’Keefe’s phones.

Days after. The FBI has had those days to extract, copy, and paw through the data.

A special master has been appointed by the court to oversee this and to cull the data that the Privacy Protection Act, along with DoJ regulations, explicitly bar Government from seizing from reporters. However, on what basis do we believe the FBI has actually “paused” its review? Even were the phones physically transferred to the possession of this special master, on what basis do we believe that agents this government have stopped pawing through the data they’ve seized? On what basis do we believe those agents of this government have destroyed—or even sequestered—their copies?

Among those data are

confidential and privileged information…of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications

And

reporters’ notes. A lot of…sources unrelated to this story and a lot of confidential donor information to our news organization.

This is not overreach. This is naked abuse of raw power and a deliberate, considered disregard for law, for the liberties and rights of American citizens.

It’s going to be a long three years.

(Aside: what was this stuff doing on a cell phone, anyway? This is taking convenience too far at the expense of security.)

Government Press

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That’s another item buried in President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate’s reconciliation bill.

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act (LJSA), first introduced in July, would provide a local media advertising credit of up to $5,000 in the first year and up to $2,500 in the next four years, covering 80% of advertising costs in the first year and 50% in the following four years.
Other elements of the bill would provide a federal tax credit to local media outlets that hire local news reporters, covering half of compensation up to $50,000 in the first year, and 30% of compensation up to $50,000 in the following four years. To be eligible, reporters would need to meet a minimum of 100 hours of work per quarter.

Those 100 hours required to get a “reporter” subsidy (here in the form of tax credits) aren’t even for half-time work: they’re less than 20% of full time. Get a Government subsidy for “hiring” a dilettante or a hobbyist. Nice gig for the dilettante or hobbyist.

And what’s with the advertising subsidy (tax credit)? Advertisers pay the outlet for advertising time and space; outlets don’t pay the advertisers for gracing their pages.

Senator Maria Cantwell (D, WA), the item’s sponsor:

The tax incentives in this bill will help local newspapers and digital-only news journalists and broadcast newsrooms remain financially viable to retain and hire local base journalists to cover local news stories.

Naturally, the news outlets and associated unions, including National Public Radio, the AFL-CIO, NewsGuild-CWA, and the Writers Guild of America, East are enthusiastic about the free—an unearned—money.

It’s nonsense. If the local outlets are providing a product that’s useful to the local citizens, their readers, then the local market, those local citizens, will freely support that product with their time, eyeballs, and subscription/purchase money.

Government largesse is entirely unneeded, except as a tool for Government to use to…influence…what gets published, and just as importantly, what does not get published.

The subsidies, and their proclaimed need, are nonsense. But they’re part of what the Progressive-Democrats wish to use in their drive to expand government and government intrusiveness.

Truth and Courage

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On the matter of woke culture and canceling, The Wall Street Journal editors wrote about McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski’s private text to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot following her visit to the McDonald’s restaurant that was the scene of the murder of a 7-year-old child. That text was, in pertinent part,

p.s. tragic shootings in last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix[.]

The mob howled and Kempczinski went directly to his knees and begged forgiveness.

The Editors had this about the matter, and they’re right as far as they went.

It’s a sign of our destructive times that saying in a private text that adults have some responsibility for the fate of their children is unacceptable.

But that’s far from all of the matter. It’s also a sign of our destructive times that American CEOs like Chris Kempczinski are such abject cowards and beg to apologize for having spoken uncomfortable truths.

We don’t have a Canadian-style truth code, but with company pseudo-leaders like Kempczinski, we don’t need one.