Tag Archives: politics

He’s Right

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Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov says it’s…silly (my term)…to negotiate with the Russian barbarians while they’re still inside Ukraine.

“There’s no way to have conversations with them; you can’t talk with terrorists,”…citing Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure during a brutal winter. The war will not end, he continued, until the Ukrainian forces “turn everything back—all the territories.”

And

“Everything will be linked once again, including Crimea,” Danilov said. “Not one meter will be left for the taking of the enemy.”

Indeed. How is it even possible to negotiate with an entity whose first and only goal is the utter dissolution of your nation?

Readers of this blog know the peace terms I’ve been advocating for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to require.

California Gun Control

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California has a new law, with effect at the start of this year, that requires semiautomatic pistols sold there to have microstamping capability on the pistols’ firing pins. The tech would stamp the brass when the pistol discharges a round, and from that, the brass could be tied back to the pistol that fired it.

As part of the implementation, the California Department of Justice now asks Firearm manufacturers and Interested Parties a number of questions about how the rule should be implemented. These questions include

  • Who is best suited to provide the microstamp to the DOJ?
  • When should the microstamp be provided to the DOJ?
  • How should the microstamp be provided to the DOJ?
  • If a microstamp part needs to be replaced, should the regulated replacement part have the same microstamp as the original?

This Interested Party offers some answers, even though I’m not a citizen of California, being glad instead to be a citizen of Texas:

  • No one
  • Never
  • N/A, see above
  • N/A, see above

California’s move is just another in a long chain of efforts by gun control…persons…to build up a database of who has what firearms so they can be seized at a later date.

No Speaker of the House

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The Wall Street Journal had a brief blurb on what to expect from the House of Representatives while it has no Speaker.

With no speaker, the House is at a standstill. The members have not been sworn-in, meaning there technically isn’t a House of Representatives in the country right now. Committees can’t be organized and they can’t vote on legislation.

That last bit—no legislation—is key for me. With the House unable to vote on legislation, so long as there’s no Speaker, that means the Federal debt ceiling can’t be raised, taxes can’t be raised, and spending can’t be increased. Ultimately (later rather than sooner) the Federal government would be forced to vastly curtail operations. Curtail, not close as so many sensationalist journalists and in-office politicians so loudly bleat, because existing taxes would continue to be collected, and existing spending programs would continue to spend.

For me, that lack of legislation is a major plus; although it would be useful were the Idiot Five to get out of the way so a Speaker could be chosen, and the Republican-led House set about returning to Republican roots and reduce tax rates, reallocate (tightly controlled and reduced) spending away from current welfare cages and toward securing our border, supporting Ukraine seriously against the barbarian invasion, (re)arming the Republic of China, greatly reducing Federal regulations.

Indications of the Extent of the Exposure

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A Rapid City city councilman, Jason Salamun, wants to ban TikTok from city-owned devices and networks, and to prohibit city agencies from using the app. A councilwoman, Laura Armstrong, opposes the proposed ban, claiming Rapid City has bigger problems to solve, such as crime and drugs. Yet that just illustrates how easily the ban could be enacted compared with solutions to those bigger problems.

Armstrong also claims—and she’s serious—that TikTok isn’t a threat. Never mind that TikTok is wholly owned by People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance, and that under the PRC’s national intelligence law, ByteDance can be required by the nation’s intelligence apparatus to conduct espionage on American government and business entities and on individual Americans. That espionage would be done through TikTok.

Armstrong did some of her own research on the matter.

Among the things she found, the city’s exhibition center could lose business because contracts with musicians require the venue to promote gigs via TikTok, she said.
The city’s fire and police departments use TikTok to recruit, and the Solid Waste department has an official TikTok account….

That demonstrates how widespread the city’s exposure is, yet Armstrong is arguing, and again she’s actually serious, that far from demonstrating the threat, this exposure demonstrates only the difficulty of ridding the city of the threat.

Go figure.

Yes, and No

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Company employees are getting pay raises just for staying on the job rather than moving on to other endeavors.

Wages for workers who stayed at their jobs were up 5.5% in November from a year earlier, averaged over 12 months, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That was up from 3.7% annual growth in January 2022 and the highest increase in 25 years of record-keeping.

It’s also the case that new hires are getting bigger signing bonuses, initial salaries, and more perks for joining the company.

However, this claim by The Wall Street Journal (at the link above) is mostly backwards in the present environment:

Faster wage growth is contributing to historically high inflation….

It’s true that increasing wages—increasing labor costs generally—feeds into inflation as companies have to raise their prices when labor costs eat too far into their profit margins. However, as WSJ also noted,

Prices rose at their fastest pace in 40 years earlier in 2022.

That sharp rise in inflation actually began before the sharp rise in wages, and it has far outstripped the rise in wages: 2022’s inflation peaked above 9%, and it’s still around 7%. The current wage increase is only a nominal increase. The real change in wages, what real people spend on real necessities and wants, has been negative: that 5.5% nominal increase in November, compared with November’s 7.1% inflation for instance, actually represents a 1.6% decrease in actual buying power for us average Americans.

The fact is that the current period of high inflation is driving the rise in labor costs, not the other way around.