More Reasons to Disband

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Now the Biden administration is actively seeking to undermine our friends and allies on top of destroying our energy industry.

The White House on Friday announced a temporary pause on pending decisions of exports of liquefied natural gas to non-free trade countries, until the Energy Department can factor climate change into its reviews of the projects.

Two changes (for starters) are badly needed, and these changes badly need significant majorities in the House and Senate and a Republican in the White House (which puts a premium on the elections this fall).

One of those changes is enactment of a statute giving the relevant approval authority(s) 10 calendar days in which to approve an export application or to provide a detailed explanation for denial, which explanation must have only concrete, measurable reasons, be devoid of generalities, and be publicly available NLT the 11th day. Absent such a decision, the application must be deemed approved.

The other change is the disbandment of the Department of Energy with all Department personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. The only functions remotely worth retaining are ARPA-Energy and Science and Innovation, which should be folded into ARPA with circumscribed funding authorities.

Another change, in furtherance of the concept of the second change, is the disbandment of the Environmental Protection Agency, with its personnel also returned to the private sector, rather than reassigned within the Federal government. This agency—the managers in charge of it, along with its employees, have for too long conflated environmental protection with climate “protection,” with its cockamamy decisions exemplified by its ruling that plant food in our atmosphere—CO2—is a pollutant.

Contemptibly Unsurprising

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Israel has uncovered evidence that UNRWA operatives personnel participated in Hamas’ 7 October ’23 butchery inside Israel, and the nation has passed that evidence along to relevant authorities, including to the UN.

The commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East announced Friday that UNRWA was suspending the alleged participants and launching an investigation.

Suspended their employees—ooh—that’ll show them. UNRWA will conduct an investigation? Say, rather, UNRWA will whitewash itself.

This unsurprising behavior by the UNRWA is merely an extension of its long and active support of the terrorist gang that is Hamas and its Gaza Strip predecessor, the Palestinian Authority, reaching at least as far back as the terrorists’ 2014 attacks on Israel, when the UN agency served as weapons storage facilities for Hamas’s predecessor.

It’s long past time for our own government to stop its timid finger-wagging and take more serious action about the UNRWA’s terrorist support than temporarily paus[ing] all additional funding to the agency and the moderately firm words of welcome[ing] the decision to conduct such an investigation and Secretary General Guterres’ pledge to take decisive action to respond, should the allegations prove accurate.

That more serious action should begin, but not stop, with formally announcing that, aside from permanently halting funding to this UN terrorism-supporting agency, all further statements by the UNRWA will no longer be heard and no action in response to them will be taken, and more concretely on the one hand, getting out of the way of Israel and letting that nation prosecute its existential defense in the war Hamas is waging, and on the other hand, actively supporting the nation in its defense for its own survival.

GOP Weakness Continues

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Aside from the Republican party’s timidity in its Congressional “negotiations” regarding budgeting and border security, here’s another example, laid out in crystalline terms in the lede.

The House subcommittee chairman [Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA)] leading the January 6 investigation is declaring that the Biden White House’s foot-dragging has been “unacceptable” and he is putting both presidential aides and the Georgia county prosecutor pursuing Donald Trump on notice that Congress is prepared to pursue evidence, up to and including subpoenas and contempt.

Stop yapping and issue the subpoenas. Republicans asked once, politely, for the materials and been rebuffed. Stop meekly wasting time, and get on with the investigation. The Biden administration’s own foot-dragging does not need the Republican contribution to delays in the investigation.

A Department of Veterans Affairs Fail

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Yet another in an appallingly long list of Veterans Affairs fails.

This time it’s the VA’s conscious decision to deprecate, if not outright ignore, our nation’s veterans and to give priority access to limited resources to illegal aliens instead. Yes, yes, they signed a contract with ICE to do this, but they were not forced to do so. Here’s Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN):

We checked this week; it is up to one million claims for healthcare and benefits. As we were doing some oversight work of the VA, we realized that what they were doing was using some of their resources and their money to allow veterans—to approve veterans for community care—and to process claims, or to approve community care, for illegal immigrants, not for veterans, and then also to process claims for illegal immigrants.

And

When you’ve got a backlog of a million veterans that are waiting to get healthcare, and are waiting to get benefit answers, and you find out that money that should be being used to solve their situations is being used for illegal immigrants…it is absolutely maddening[.]

Indeed.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

A Gen-Zer is Upset

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The young woman is tired of her generation being called lazy because they—she in particular—are working 40-hour weeks, “barely getting by,” and don’t want to do that for the rest of their lives. They have other things they want to do. She then insisted that today’s economy is not the one in which prior generations started out, and Gen-Zers starting out have it hard today compared to earlier generations when we were starting out.

She has a beef in some respects.

However.

Here is what was available to this Boomer when I was just starting out.

The house I grew up in was all of 1232 square feet, compared with today’s median size of 2500 square feet. That house didn’t have central air conditioning. We were some years into it before we got a window air conditioner for our living room. Such basics as a thermostat for the furnace was a manually set mercury-based affair, not today’s programmable with its variety of part-of-day or -night or vacation settings.

We didn’t spend $250 and more per month on cable TV—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t spend $50-$100 per month on an Internet connection—there was no Internet.

We didn’t spend $80-$120 per month on cell phone service—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t drop $800 on a new cell phone—they not only didn’t exist, the phone company gave us our landline instrument as part of their POTS service. (Don’t know what that is? Welcome to my starting out world. Go look it up, if it doesn’t interfere too badly with modern priorities.)

We didn’t hire Uber or Lyft or Door-Dash or anything of that ilk—that ilk didn’t exist. We drove ourselves, or went shanks mare. And doggy to go bags were our takeout.

We didn’t have much in the way of shipping costs, other than moving our household, or the occasional order from a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog—there was no such thing as eTail.

We couldn’t even order our books online. We used the local library, or we drove (or did that shanks mare thing) down to the local bookstores. Of course, the library or the bookstore could special order a book we wanted. By sending a letter or making a POTS call. And we could go pick up the book at the library or bookstore when it arrived.

We spent nothing on programs for our personal computers or laptops or aps for our cell phones—that kind of software programming didn’t exist, and neither did the personal computers or laptops, or cell phones to run them on. Spreadsheets? Those were paper-printed grids on which we used pencil or pen. Word processors? Manual typewriters, or pencil/pen and paper. We did have actual (hand-cranked) adding machines, though, so it wasn’t all pencil and paper.

If we wanted to talk to our neighbors, we visited them or they us. If the ones we wanted to talk with lived far away, we wrote postcards and letters. International mail was something else, with its folding envelopes on which we wrote our letters, and then folded them to become the international mail envelope to save the weight of an additional sheet of paper. Or we called long distance (haven’t heard of that? Welcome to another aspect of the modern world, which isn’t what I started out with) on our landline POTS service. International calls were both especially expensive and faint of voice on both ends. There was no concept of electronic social media.

The list goes on and on.

If Gen-Zers want to start out with costs similar to those earlier starting-out generations, they need to learn to live without all of today’s technology.

Further, regarding today:

When I finally walked out the door in retirement from my skilled professional job, I still was working 50-60 hour weeks. That schedule wasn’t universal, but it was quite common throughout those earlier start-outers’ careers. We had families to support and kids’ college to plan for. Family mattered, not personal wants. Indeed, family was central to our personal wants, and gladly so. We weren’t centered exclusively, or even primarily, on our selves.

The mom-and-pop HVAC folks who deal with my current house’s heating and air conditioning (central, mind you, today) not only work those 60-hour weeks, they work holidays, too, including Christmas. It’s the same for the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, road builders, all the trades.

One last fillip. This particular Boomer did have a somewhat easier time handling my starting out costs. I’d enlisted in the USAF, getting commissioned through my college’s ROTC. With that military career as my first, I was given structure, a place to live, and a grocery store that was a bit cheaper than the local economy grocery stores. The young woman, and others of her cohort, might think about enlisting in one or another branch of our military, whether as enlisted or as an officer. They’d be helping out their nation’s security, and they’d learn what work truly is and how rewarding it can be.