Category Archives: politics

Secular Authority and Morals

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A letter writer in a recent Wall Street Journal‘s Letters to the Editor section, demurred from Attorney General William Barr’s remarks on secularism and religion at the University of Notre Dame’s Law School and de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The letter’s author wrote,

Our society can teach morality, ethics, civility, self-reliance, and humility without reference to religion or any particular faith. Children can be taught….

Certainly, such principles can be taught.  But how to enforce them? Relying on Government for enforcement means relying on the men who are in Government from time to time, men with views on the legitimacy of those principles and the means of their enforcement that are as variable as those men. And each man’s views will vary over time.

No, moral and ethical principles are universal and timeless, and the only even moderately sure way of enforcing them is through appeal to a higher power—in fine, to religion, which is what our republic’s founding documents do, and our Founders did.

Warren’s Assault on Hydrocarbons

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want so ban new leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on Federal lands, and she wants to ban fracking altogether. This assault on our national energy underpinnings would have far-reaching negative outcomes.

  • domestic natural-gas prices would jump to somewhere between $9 and $15 per million BTUs from last Friday’s $2.32
  • oil would rise to the $80-to-$85 range and could run to $150 during market shocks from last Friday’s $53.78
  • entire oil-field service companies would become obsolete
  • pipeline owners would suffer without replenishment, as existing wells peter out

Think how such price increases for basic transportation and such job losses would hammer “the little guy” that Warren pretends to so want to protect from Evil Big Business.

And some far-reaching positive outcomes: for Canada, Russia, and OPEC.

  • Canadian shale drillers
  • big global operators for which higher energy prices would offset losses on US assets.
  • Russia: our ability to free our friends and allies from dependence on Russian oil and gas
  • Russia and OPEC: the potential for political and economic dominance by these two from their enhanced ability to commit energy blackmail (both of which have demonstrated histories of engaging in such blackmail)—sources of market shocks

Here is a core part of Warren’s foreign policy.

Lynching

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Much ado is being crafted over President Donald Trump’s use of the word “lynching” to describe what the House Progressive-Democrats are doing with their “impeachment” smear.

They neglect the fact that at least as many whites were lynched in our history—for crimes ranging from rustling, murder, rape, and the like, to “crimes” of supporting or protecting blacks—as there were blacks lynched for the “crime” of being black after our Civil War.

Which brings me to the party that is doing the most crying over Trump’s use of the term.

The Democratic Party:

  • the party of slavery
  • the party that forced a Civil War in an attempt to preserve their access to slaves
  • the party that pushed gun control to keep blacks disarmed
  • the party of Jim Crow
  • the party of the KKK, which conducted the lynchings to which the bodice rippers refer—they condemn themselves when they focus on this
  • the party that resegregated the Federal government after Republicans has succeeded, in the main, in integrating it
  • the party that nationalized minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks trapped on southern plantations instead of being able to move north to compete on wages with white unions for factory jobs
  • the party of racist and sexist affirmative action programs

That party’s modern evolution, the Progressive-Democratic Party:

  • the party that continues to pursue race- and sex-based affirmative action
  • the party that pursues racist college and university admission preferences
  • the party that objects to blacks and all other minorities having access to quality K-12 schooling by blocking voucher and charter schools
  • the party of identity politics—21st century segregation

These politicians, objecting to Trump’s use of the term, expose their own racism with their manufactured dudgeon.

There are Bribes

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…and there are bribes.  Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam tried to bribe the good people of Hong Kong the other day.  She gave her annual address on her policies for the coming year, and in it she “promised” (because we’ve seen the value of her commitments in her promise to completely withdraw and rescind her draft extradition law, a promise on which she has since welched)

to boost the supply of low-cost homes, offer mortgage assistance for first-time buyers, and increase mass-transit fare subsidies

if only Hong Kong’s people would just shut up, go home, and submit.

Those folks didn’t, and don’t, believe her.

Mrs Lam’s speech this week “has not really focused on the protest itself,” a 26-year-old demonstrator…said Sunday.

And tens of thousands of Hong Kong’s finest hit the streets again Sunday, to be met with tear gas and water cannon firing abrasive, dyed liquids shot at them by Hong Kong’s increasingly thuggish police.  It’s true enough, some demonstrators also have resorted to violence—lighting fires in street intersections, trashing some store fronts, the rare Molotov cocktail tossed at those police.  It’s also true enough that incitement to violence, even when the incitement comes from police, is not, by itself, an excuse for responding with violence.

However, given that Lam and her city government have utterly ignored the desires of the people over whom she reigns as PRC President Xi Jinping’s satrap, their increasing frustration and violence are completely understandable.

Lam’s bribes, which insult those citizens’ integrity and intelligence, only add fuel to that frustration.

Costs of a Strike

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There’s a lot of discussion about the costs of the UAW’s strike against GM.  The Wall Street Journal is an example:

Economists say the cascading effect of lost wages, production, and employment will likely linger even if the strike ends….

And

…suspended work at another two dozen company-owned parts warehouses and distribution centers and led to temporary layoffs of nearly 10,000 GM factory workers not represented by the UAW….

And

Striking GM workers also are pulling back on spending, having now lost a month’s worth of company paychecks. Many are trying to get by on $275 a week, the strike pay offered by the UAW to provide some financial assistance. That figure is a fraction of their regular pay, which ranges from $630 to $1,200 for a 40-hour week.

And

120 of GM’s direct suppliers furloughed some 17,000 workers in the US during the strike….

And the damage from the UAW’s action has spread even farther, as this example illustrates:

Sam Kassab, 65, owns the Chene Trombly market where he sells food and liquor close to GM’s Detroit assembly plant. The strike is costing him between 10% to 15% of his usual business, Mr Kassab said, with most of that caused by layoffs at the supplier factories nearby.

No one, though, is talking about the cost of the strike to the union—not the workers, but the UAW itself.  Who, or what, is propping up the UAW, covering its costs, as it prosecutes it blockage of GM’s ability to function at all unless the union gets its way (with all the resulting collateral damage to suppliers, about which the UAW so plainly cares not a whit)?

And another discussion not being held: how will the UAW make whole those collaterally damaged suppliers and their workers?