Category Archives: regulation

The Fox Investigating the Hen House Leak, Revisited

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I mentioned Fox Business News‘ reporting on the FAA’s carefully biased “outreach” plan for increasing “diversity” in its air traffic controller employee base nearly a year ago, and I concluded that brief mention with the seemingly cynical remark, “Stand by for another whitewash.”

Now, it seems the whitewash is well in hand. DoT conducted its investigation, and there’s no word on its outcome. The FAA conducted its investigation; it

concluded an internal investigation which cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong. In a statement sent to members of Congress last month the FAA claimed its Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety (ASH) had conducted an investigation into the allegations of cheating and favoritism. The FAA claims it was a thorough investigation which reviewed relevant audio recordings and documents. The statement says, “ASH found no specific information or evidence supporting claims that Human Resources employees improperly provided an advantage to ATCS applicants affiliated with the NBCFAE….”

The NBCFAE, recall, is the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees, one of whose members, Moranda Reilly (among others),

received emails in December 2013 and a recorded message from NBCFAE officer and air traffic controller Shelton Snow.   Reilly says the emails included buzzwords that, “…would help identify us. Key words the system would pick up. It was a kind of a way for our resumes to be picked and chosen. We were told not to share this information with anybody outside NBCFAE.”

Now, in an attempted final response to a FOIA request for those and related emails pursuant to a related law suit, the FAA has filed a motion with the Federal court presiding claiming it is

unable to recover missing and “corrupted” emails….

The FAA reached its conclusion of no wrong-doing, no carefully constructed bias in its air traffic controller applicant selection, by the FAA knowing these critical data weren’t being used in its investigation.

The “missing and unrecoverable” status of that evidence seems awfully convenient.

The PRC’s Currency

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The PRC’s Premier Li Keqiang and its People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan had some words about this at last weekend’s G-20 conference.

China emerged from the weekend Group of 20 meeting with a new measure of trust from major trading partners that it won’t significantly devalue the yuan.

Zhou was quite explicit.

There is no basis for persistent [yuan] depreciation from the perspective of economic fundamentals[.]

What this means, too, is that from within its centrally managed economy, the government is defining “economic fundamentals,” and so the government also has no intention of allowing the currency to float; it’ll continue to manage that value for government purposes in every respect.

Global Warming, Again

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A guest essayist at Watts Up With That has an interesting article. Here’s the closing paragraph (as usual, RTWT):

In summary, approximately 81% of the warming in the last century may have resulted from all anthropogenic influences, as suggested by figure 4 [see the article]. This includes water vapor, CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and land use changes to the albedo and thermal mass. CO2 may account for as much as 52% to 56% of the contribution from anthropogenic drivers (See Figs. 1 & 2). Fossil fuel-CO2 represents less than 75% of anthropogenic CO2. If we were successful in completely phasing out fossil fuels over the next 100 years, we would have a reduction of 50% in average CO2 emissions. If the Earth is warming at a nominal rate of 1°C per 100 years from all influences, then we can hope, at best, for a reduction in temperature increase of 20% (0.54×0.75×0.50) or 0.20°C. That is to say, if the world were to phase out fossil fuels in the next 100 years the warming would be 0.80 degrees instead of 1.00°C! Unfortunately, eliminating fossil fuel use will probably not be successful in significantly reducing future temperature increases, even if it can be accomplished.

A whole two tenths of a Centigrade degree, out of a climatista-expected entire one Centigrade degree. Imagine that.

Don’t Let the Door

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…hit you in the fanny on the way out.

A University of Texas Dean [Fritz Steiner, Dean of the Texas School of Architecture] said Thursday he’s leaving the school to pursue a different job in large part because of the new Texas law that will allow concealed firearms in public college classrooms.

And

Steiner said he’s not anti-guns, but doesn’t want them in the halls of higher education. Texas faculty have worried allowing guns could have a chilling effect on academic freedom and frank discussions in classrooms.

Because he and his special snowflakes are zealously opposed to opposing, even merely differing, opinions, and they project their own response techniques to disagreements onto others. After all, academic freedom and frank discussions mean “do it my way” and “think like I do.” Just look at all the faculty-supported “safe spaces” and “free speech zones” Academia have sprouted all over our colleges and universities. See, also, the Melissa Clicks of academe. That Click ultimately was fired for her abuses is newsworthy only because of the unusualness of such abuses being recognized.

A Dangerous Precedent

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I’m hardly a Russian apologist; I’d as soon see the place cleared off and the land restored to the forest and steppe of an earlier era.

However.

Russia is setting up to issue $3 billion in bonds, and they’ve invited a number of European, PRC, and American banks to bid on the issue—a standard government bond issue process, except that these are Russian bonds. Aside from that, the bonds are highly risky, but like many high-risk plays, the payoff can be lucrative. The decision to run a risk of this sort ordinarily is a business decision, made in a free market by the business’ managers and owners.

However.

State and Treasury have

warned some top US banks not to bid on a potentially lucrative but politically risky Russian bond deal, saying it would undermine international sanctions on Moscow, people familiar with the matter said.

Our banks’ participation in the deal is entirely legal with those international sanctions in place. But State and Treasury don’t like them.

This isn’t a President using his bully pulpit to persuade Americans to do this, don’t do that, or support this other, though.

State in particular

warned of “reputational” risks of returning “to business as usual with Russia.”

This is an agency of the Federal government making sotto voce threats against an industry to force it to support a government policy that’s carefully not encoded in law or regulation.

The market, with its understanding of Russia, is fully capable of dealing “reputational” repercussions all by itself in a free economy.

Never mind that State and Treasury each have explicitly declined to set sanctions against Russian banking or the Russian government as a whole, or that either could, if such sanctions were useful. Never mind that Congress could legislate in that direction, if such a thing were useful.

That’s the dangerous precedent. Nice bank you got there. Be too bad if something happened….