Tag Archives: regulation

CO2 Emissions

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section concerning net-zero and carbon emissions, a writer asks

When can we have an honest discussion of a plan to reduce carbon emissions?

We cannot until we have an honest discussion of the context of carbon emissions and why we should care about them. That context includes all the epochs of higher planetary temperatures and lush life, epochs of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and lush life, and those separate sets of epochs’ lack of correlation with each other.

Kind of the Purpose

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The European Union’s antitrust bureaucrats demur from Apple’s seeming dominance in the no-contact payment market, and they may or may not have a case. They don’t, though, have one based on this sham argument from EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, who also serves at the EU’s Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age (because if the title is long enough the incumbent can be made to feel important enough):

Apple has built a closed ecosystem around its devices and its operating system. Apple controls the gates to this ecosystem, setting the rules of the game for anyone who wants to reach consumers using Apple devices.

That’s kind of the purpose of copyrights and patents—allowing the inventor or developer of the product to control its use. In addition to which, no one is required to use Apple products to do contactless paying—or even to make telephone calls.

Neither does Apple control the ecosystem of contactless paying—it only controls its own devices, which have a, not the, contactless paying capability.

Prolonging the Crisis on Purpose?

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First, we have Brett Velicovich, a former US Army intelligence and special operations soldier, warning us that

There is a political logistics jam somewhere for the flow of training devices like this [Javelin simulators] into Ukraine, and it’s making it so they are less effective in the field and in some cases even failing on the front lines when being fired.

That political holdup is within the Biden-Harris administration.

Then we get Samantha Power, United States Agency for International Development Administrator, saying openly in regard to the relationship between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Left’s push to convert us to “green” energy no matter the cost,

Never let a crisis go to waste[,]

and that [as cited by Fox News]

fertilizer shortages would provide farmers the opportunity to “hasten” their “transition” from fertilizer to more “natural” resources.

And we get Jennifer Granholm, Biden-Harris’ Energy Secretary who, not so long ago, thought the idea of bringing down the price of gasoline and oil was laugh-out-loud hilarious, saying much the same thing, urging Congress to [again as cited by Fox News]

use this crisis to pass “clean energy” legislation and to “wean off” fossil fuels.

This along with Biden-Harris himself still slow-walking (albeit at a lessening obstructive pace) transferring arms to Ukraine so that nation can defeat Russia’s invasion—all while studiously continuing to refuse to say that Ukraine can, and must, win the war Russia has inflicted.

Is being green is more important than being free and sovereign?

Hmm….

Disinformation

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…about his new Truth Division Disinformation Governance Board.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said “there’s no question” he could have more effectively communicated the purpose of his newly-created “disinformation” board….

Mayorkas also said that his

Disinformation Governance Board [is] to combat online disinformation….

Of course, it is. And it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will decide what is truth and what is fiction and who will dictate via that Truther Board what we American citizens will be permitted to hear, and it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will tell us how to evaluate what their Board allows to be passed.

And this from Mayorkas:

You know, an individual has the free speech right to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric. What they don’t have the right to do is take hostages in a synagogue, and that’s where we get involved.

That’s a cynically and dishonestly presented red herring. Those two items have little to do with each other, and we already have statutes on the books barring the latter, as well as barring the former from taking the form of inciting the latter. No Truther Board is needed except to push Government censorship.

Putting a woman well-known for her own disinformation-spreading enthusiasm and skill in charge of the Board makes plain the degree of censorship to which this agency’s actions are intended to reach.

A Couple of Illustrations

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Taken from a Wall Street Journal article otherwise centered on the alleged pitfalls of calling an end to the Wuhan Virus situation. First up:

“We’re in uncharted waters. There’s not a blueprint to say, ‘OK, this is how this politically unfolds, coming out of a pandemic’,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster.

Politically unfolds. Not how it unfolds from a health perspective, or from a national benefit perspective, or even from what’s good for a politician’s constituency. No, what matters to the politician is how this unfolds to the benefit of a politician’s personal standing in office or in gaining/retaining office.

And this one, in which the journalism guild is an enthusiastic participant.

For example, some moderate Senate Democrats and most Republicans who voted to end the federal mask mandate last month are now calling on the administration to keep in place Title 42—which is predicated on the idea that the country faces a Covid-19 emergency.

No, Title 42 is a law, long predating the Wuhan Virus situation, that was designed to bar from entry into our nation those wanting to immigrate from nations with their own health emergencies. The press is actively complicit in distorting that law’s invocation as a means of dealing with our own emergency. Title 42 was invoked during the just concluded “emergency” (concluded in fact if not by political recognition) to keep those from nations with major Wuhan Virus outbreaks from coming here and making our own situation worse.

It’s certainly true that some of the invocation was motivated as a means of illegal alien entry control and that some of the invocation was motivated by the existence of our own virus situation. Those, though, were and are secondary to the simple fact that the law is designed, and presently used, to protect us from immigrants and illegal aliens potentially bringing with them disease outbreaks in their countries of origin.