Tag Archives: politics

The Climate Emergency

Posted on by
2

There is no climate emergency.

That’s the opening sentence of a letter from Professor Guus Berkhout of The Hague and 500 other scientists and climate science professionals to António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, and Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Berkhout, et al., did expand on that.

The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose. Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions on the basis of results from such immature models.

These immature models have, in fact, consistently failed to predict the past and the present simultaneously, and they’ve badly overstated, to the point of exaggeration, the predicted future amount of global warming over each of the last 20 years.

Those models also ignore all the natural causes of what is, in fact, planetary warming: the sun has been warming for some 4.5 billion years, so of course the earth has been, also.  Orbital mechanics play a significant role, too, not only our trip around the sun, but the precession of our rotational axis.  We (in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land surface turns out to be—a tectonic plate motion that also plays a role in our climate evolution) currently tilt toward the sun when we’re farthest away, and tilt away from it when we’re closest. That’s why our summers and winters are so relatively temperate and close to each other in average temperatures.

Our axis precesses, though, at a rate that completes a cycle in 26,000 years.  Thus, in a few thousand years (think of the time since the last Ice Age for an idea of how quick that is, geologically.  It’s well inside, for instance, the rate at which our tectonic plates mosey around), we’ll tilt toward the sun at our closest approach to the sun and away from it at our farthest.  Those will be some hot summers and cold winters in the northern hemisphere.  Climate control that.

For all of this, though, at present we are, and for the foreseeable future (in human lifetime terms), will be some degrees cooler than the geologic warming trend line, and it’ll be a significant while before we even warm up to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or the climate extant during the height of the Roman empire.

Politicizing Tragedy

Posted on by
Reply

Recall a mass shooting in 2018 at a Thousand Oaks, CA, bar in which 13 were killed and a dozen injured.  Recall further that Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus was killed as he moved to stop the killer from doing more.

Various charity activities since had raised thousands of dollars for the families of other police officers who’d also died in the course of their several duties, and

The Blue Bowl, a charity flag football game, was intended to raise money for the family of fallen Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus as well as [those] other officers killed in the line of duty….

However, Thousand Oaks Police Chief Tim Hagel has pulled his department out of the event, leading to its cancelation, and all that money already raised for those other officers’ families is

now being returned to donors….

All, and solely, because Trump supporters would be speaking at the event.

Mike Randall, Fallen Officers Foundation Vice President:

He [Hagel] basically said over and over in the conversation, “This is not Trump country, that slogan ‘Make America Great’ is not favorable, popular, within 1,200 square miles,” that we don’t want Republicans here. I could not believe it[.]
“The only thing,” and I quote, “the only thing you [could have done to make] this worse, Mike, was to invite Dick Cheney and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”

Now, no one will get any aid. Never mind that the collected speakers would have been an ecumenical group: Governor Gavin Newsom’s public safety liaison, Trump supporter and Hollywood icon Scott Baio—a fellow congregant of Helus’ at church—Trump-supporting singer Joy Villa, and others.

Hagel didn’t approve, so everyone gets cut off.  No one gets needed financial assistance.

This stinks.  But more dangerous than just the odor of this move, Hagel has shown that he doesn’t “serve and protect” all the citizens of Thousand Oaks.  Only those of whom he personally approves.

Raise the Price

Posted on by
Reply

…of a product, and with that, lower demand for it.  This is the sort of thing taught in high school introductory economics courses.  One way to raise the price is to raise taxes related to it, and to reduce tax deductions related to it.

The Manhattan real estate market [a generally hgh-end market] stumbled in the third quarter of 2019, new reports show, as prices plunged and fewer buyers were willing to purchase higher-priced properties in the wake of two recent tax increases.
The median sales price for properties fell 17% from the same quarter last year…. The average sales price dropped 12%….
Condo sales fell 8%….

Maybe this had something to do with it:

In July, New York City increased its mansion tax—a progressive tax that applies to home sales of more than $1 million—to a maximum of 3.9%, up from a flat-rate of 1%. The tax rates vary from 1.25% for $2 million sales, to 3.9% for sales of $25 million and higher. The city also increased a one-time charge on properties worth more than $2 million—known as the transfer tax.

And maybe the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) imposed by the 2017 tax reform bill is having an impact.

Yes, Trump Did Commit an Impeachable Offense

Posted on by
Reply

Notwithstanding lawyer and Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett’s hysterical musings to the contrary.

As Jarrett correctly quoted, but mischaracterized, then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s (R, MI) remark on impeachment,

An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.

Jarrett is right that this isn’t what the Constitution’s authors intended, but it’s what they wrote, and it’s what our Constitution has said ever since.  High Crimes and Misdemeanors were completely undefined by them and by any ratification since.

The Progressive-Democrat caucus in the House is bound and determined to get rid of a President whom they consider to have stolen their personal property—the 2016 Presidential election—and so to prevent him from continuing to squat on their property after the 2020 Presidential election.  In the course of their effort, they are, indeed, denigrating the meaning of every word in that phrase, including the “and.”

They’re after charging President Donald Trump with the heinous behavior of asking the President of a foreign nation to look into the possibility of corruption in his own nation and the possibility of a role that corruption may have played in our 2016 election.  The impeachers insist that President Donald Trump demanded a quid pro quo, withholding military aid funding, against that President complying with the request.  Never mind that the Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelenskiy, has said on multiple occasions that he was not pressured at all, or that Ukraine’s Foreign Minister has said Ukraine didn’t even know any funds for military aid had been held up until a month after that telecon.

They’re after, also, charging Trump with the heinous crime of asking the same foreign nation to look into the possibility that a Progressive-Democrat, in his capacity as Vice President, might have extorted that same nation into stopping a corruption investigation into a business on whose board of directors that Vice President’s son sat and firing the Prosecutor General leading it.  That look-into involved a request for help from that nation because the activity occurred in that nation.  Never mind, here, that the impeachers insist that the subject of this requested look must be above investigation because he is a Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for President, not because he might be innocent.

An impeachment is nothing more than a grand jury indictment, and as is well known across a broad range of venues, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if he sees fit.  The foolishness of this impeachment effort; the dishonesty underlying it; the plain, naked politics of the Progressive-Democrats’ effort to preempt the upcoming Presidential election with it—all are palpable and lay bare the nature of it.

Yes, Trump did commit impeachable offenses, as Progressive-Democrats in the House define the terms, and when they do get their impeachment done, they will be exposed for the irrational politicians they are, and for persons bent on their own political gain at the expense of their constituents’ interests and instructions.

Unfortunately, Jarrett’s name-calling and snark-ridden op-ed lends neither the Conservative cause in general nor the Trump matter in particular any credibility at all.

More on Free Speech

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another example of Progressive-Democrats and Party’s Presidential candidates objecting to free speech.

Senator [and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate] Kamala Harris said on Monday night that President Trump should have his Twitter account suspended over his tweets about the whistleblower whose complaint has helped launch an official House inquiry into his potential impeachment.

Trump’s terrible crime here? He expressed his desire to meet his accuser, a right all Americans have when accused of wrong-doing.

She went on, paraphrased by Fox News:

Harris said Trump’s latest tweets, in which he called the whistleblower “close to a spy,” is evidence that he is “irresponsible with his words in a way that could result in harm to other people.”
“The privilege of using those words in that way should probably be taken from him,” she added.

Of course, no harm can result “to other people” from such remarks.  Except in the fetid imaginations of the Left.

A President talking directly to ordinary Americans, bypassing the NLMSM Gateway and Party-approved mechanisms—how terrible.