Not Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s War

President Donald Trump (R) is dead [sic] wrong on this one.

This is not Trump’s war (it would never have started if I was president!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war[.]

No, this is not Zelenskyy’s war, either. This is, plainly, Biden’s and Putin’s war. It’s especially Putin’s war—he’s the one who invaded, and compounding his responsibility, he sent the invasion in utterly without provocation. Ex-President Joe Biden (D), played a critical role in Putin’s decision to invade when Biden gave Putin permission to do so, saying that a small incursion would be OK.

On the other hand, Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is fighting for its existence as a sovereign, independent nation that is responsible for its own existence.

Trump is right, though, on this much:

[I]t would never have started if I was president!

“socialize the agricultural system”

That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.

Silly Question

Progressive-Democratic Party Zohran Mamdani now claims he will “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada. The editors at the WSJ wonder

if he really understood [the term and the phrase], wouldn’t he go further and outright condemn such language?

It’s a silly question. Mamdani’s claim is empty rhetoric, intended solely to garner votes, with nothing whatsoever to do with any sincere conversion of understanding.

Mamdani fully understands the phrase and the term; that’s why encouraged it in the first place, and that’s why he continues, consciously and deliberately, to refuse to condemn it and to consciously and deliberately to weasel-word his way around questions of why he will not condemn.

This is who Party chose for their mayoral candidate, and this is who New York City residents are on the cusp of electing as their mayor.

The city is about to get an up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have a socialist who also is an anti-Semitic bigot running their show. The rest of our nation is about to get an object lesson in the outcomes of broad socialism and rank bigotry at the top of a city government.

Hopefully, it awaken the rest of our nation and take us back toward the virtuous people that one of our Founders readily acknowledged is a necessary prerequisite for a republic and for a population to govern itself.

I support and endorse Mamdani’s election for precisely that lesson.

Conflagration of Norms

As President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Branch nominations languish in the Senate (300 of them), Republicans there are considering changing the rules to speed the nomination confirmation/rejection process. As The Wall Street Journal puts it in its lede,

…Democrats will call it President Trump’s latest conflagration of norms.

This would be, of course, typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ hypocrisy. Senate norms have already been burned to ashes in the conflagration of Party’s unprecedented obstruction of nearly all things President (read Trump) and nearly all things Republican. But especially all things (not just nearly all) regarding the President’s nominations and Party’s knee-jerk, universal attempts to block and its successes in slowest-walking the confirmation process. Progressive-Democrats are actively stalling even minor nominees who won bipartisan support in committee, just in petty protest of Trump policy (Party politicians claim it’s over his firing of Party-favored Executive Branch appointees, but their obstruction is much broader than that).

Changing the rules in the way Republicans are proposing—limited time to debate each nomination, allowing nominations to be considered in batches, with each batch subject to that same limited debate time—are sorely needed, and the change would benefit all Presidents, not just Trump.

The folks a President nominates and wants confirmed are intended to be members of the President’s team. Party politicians, though, are with their actions demanding confirmees be members of Party’s team, regardless of which party is in power from administration to administration.

I Will Be Brief

But the climate-funding industry mavens still will not enjoy this. Steven Koonis, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and one of five authors of a Department of Energy report on climate—what really is known and not known about our changing climate—had these points in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

  • Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.
  • Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon-dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.
  • Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.
  • While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.
  • Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.
  • The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.
  • Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

It’s long past time to stop funding that industry and shift the funding to energy production while maintaining environmental damage controls. Environmental damage: not from atmospheric CO2 or too many jet aircraft contrails, for instance, but from damages as the acid rain of mercury-laden fossil fuel smoke (nearly completely eradicated); from the disposal of lithium batteries at the end of their battery car lifetimes; and from the tailings from mining the likes of lithium, copper, and cobalt to make those batteries and battery cars.