Monday, February 28, 2022
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Don't turn Maryland into a tent city
From the Washington Examiner
President Joe Biden came into office promising to use California, a state people are literally fleeing because of its high taxes and deteriorating quality of life, as his policy model for the nation. But even he probably didn't expect other cities and states to take the very worst aspects of California and adopt them voluntarily.
In Maryland, Del. Sheila Ruth, a Democrat, has proposed a state law that would result in homeless tent cities springing up throughout Maryland, making it impossible for municipalities to shut them down.
Surely, Marylanders have already seen the deleterious effects of massive homeless encampments in so many West Coast communities. The crime they spawn and the disease they spread are a blight upon formerly attractive downtown areas such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Over the last decade, these cities' inability to enforce rules against encampments has caused an explosion in the homeless population.
The West Coast's homeless disaster began, of all places, in Idaho. The city of Boise, which has the misfortune of being subject to the whims of the left-wing federal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was sued for ticketing people who appropriated public land by camping on city sidewalks and under overpasses. The city was ultimately enjoined from enforcing laws that had deterred vagrancy unless it could provide shelter beds to every single homeless person. After a protracted appeals process, the Supreme Court refused to take up the case in 2019, leaving cities throughout Idaho, Nevada, Montana, California, Oregon, Arizona, and Washington unable to enforce such laws.
Boise's weather is harsh enough that its homeless population was always relatively small, so it had the option of funding a few additional shelter beds and then building a skateboard park over the site of the homeless encampment. But larger cities with milder weather cannot possibly hope to do such a thing, leading to homeless populations that are far too large — in Los Angeles, the homeless population is greater than the entire population of Annapolis, Maryland.
Most people, both liberal and conservative, would like to avoid tent cities in their communities. As a recent poll shows, even residents of Washington, D.C., a city arguably more left-wing than San Francisco, believe that the police should shut down its homeless encampments yesterday.
The crisis of mass homelessness is not a function of housing being too expensive or unavailable. If that were the issue, then the homeless would just improve their situation by moving to any of the thousands of cities that currently have extremely cheap housing and abundant job opportunities. South Dakota, for example, is typical in that its unemployment rate is 2.6% and half of the places for rent cost less than $747 per month. But most long-term homeless cannot take advantage of this. They literally cannot hold down a job, no matter how many jobs are available, nor make regular payments, no matter what sort of income they could hypothetically gain access to. That's because three-quarters of long-term homelessness is the result of untreated mental illness, substance abuse, or both.
Some liberal jurisdictions have chosen to deal with this reality in a compassionate way, diverting those homeless who get arrested after petty crimes into treatment programs that will help them approach self-sufficiency. Others, such as California, are just throwing their money down the drain on useless, expensive home-building projects. Los Angeles's $1.2 billion initiative is costing as much as $837,000 to build each new housing unit — more than twice what was promised when voters approved it six years ago. That's enough to buy multiple houses for each L.A. homeless person in most midsized U.S. cities. And in six years, the program has produced only about 12% of the housing units it promised. To add insult to injury, the homeless population in L.A. has exploded since it was adopted.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is making it harder to fight homelessness by conditioning all federal funding on adherence to its own version of the debunked "housing first" ideology, effectively defunding any program that has expectations about sobriety or work requirements. This is making it hard enough for cities everywhere to deal with their problems. But things can always get worse.
Maryland and other states and cities should at least avoid replicating the problems that liberal judges imposed upon West Coast cities. Baltimore has enough trouble already — it doesn't need to become the epicenter of East Coast homelessness on top of everything else.
Saturday, February 26, 2022
This is No Joke.
...but today we're all OUT of No. 4's (by Gov't Decree).
Thursday, February 24, 2022
Patriot ALERT!
Sundance, "BOOM, Trudeau Reversal Motive Surfaces – Canadian Banking Association Was Approved by World Economic Forum To Lead the Digital ID Creation"
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. A promotional video from the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) helps to neatly connect all the dots about why the Canadian government made such a quick reversal in their bank asset seizures in the last 24 hours. And yes, as we suspected, it was almost certainly contact from the World Economic Forum to Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that triggered the change in position.
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced they would use the Emergency Act declaration to target the financial support systems, banks and accounts of the people who were protesting against COVID mandates, they not only undermined the integrity of the Canadian banking system – but they also inadvertently stuck a wrench into the plans of the World Economic Forum and the collaborative use of the Canadian Bankers Association to create a digital id.
Against the backdrop of the Canadian government action, WATCH THIS VIDEO:
If the Canadian government can arbitrarily block citizen access to their banking institution without any due process, what does that say about the system the Canadian Banking Association (CBA) was putting into place as part of their Digital ID network?
If the CBA digital identity were in place, the same people targeted by Trudeau’s use of the Emergency Act would have their entire identity blocked by the same government measures. The realization of the issue, reflected by a severe undermining of faith in the banking system, is a dramatic problem for those working to create and promote the Digital ID.
It is not coincidental the financial targeting mechanism deployed by Trudeau/Freeland, the Canadian banking system, is the same system being used to create the digital identity. As a result of the government targeting bank accounts, Finance Minister Freeland just created a reference point for those who would argue against allowing the creation of a comprehensive digital identity.
The motive for the World Economic Forum and Canadian Bankers Association to immediately reach out to Trudeau and Freeland and tell them to back off their plan is crystal clear. THAT is almost certainly why Freeland appeared so admonished, shocked and incapable of getting her footing yesterday {Go Deep}, and why the Canadian government simultaneously informed Parliament they were unfreezing the bank accounts.
However, this undermined confidence and faith in the banking system cannot be restored quickly. The toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube. The horse has left the barn. This is now a moment for damage control by the Canadian government. That is why Justin Trudeau just dropped the declaration of the Emergency Act.
It all makes sense now. All of it.
Indeed, the government leaders who take their instructions from the multinational corporations in charge of the World Economic Forum, which is to say almost all of them, are so entrenched in their need to use COVID-19 as the pry bar for the Build Back Better agenda, they simply cannot let it go.
Without COVID-19, they can’t keep the vaccination push. Without the vaccination push, they can’t keep the vaccine passport process in place. Without the vaccination passport registration process to track and monitor human behavior, the governing authorities cannot fulfill the mission of a comprehensive digital identity and social credit tracking system. Indeed, everything they seek is contingent upon keeping the premise of COVID-19 alive.
It is not accidental the World Economic Forum is at the epicenter of this
As we previously noted, the architects of the Build Back Better society (WEF) are guiding various governments on ways to create efficient registration and compliance systems, i.e. ways that permit citizens to prove their vaccinated and compliant status. As these discussions are taking place, it is prudent to pause and think very carefully, wisely.
We all know, as we are reading this, under the guise of enhancing our safety, the U.S. Federal Government is in discussions with the medical community, multinational corporations and employers of citizens to create a more efficient process for you to register your vaccine compliance
We know their conversation under the terminology of a COVID Passport. The current goal is to make a system for us to show and prove our authorized work status, which, as you know, is based on your obedience to a mandated vaccine.
Beta tests are being conducted in various nations, each with different perspectives and constitutional limitations, based on pesky archaic rules and laws that govern freedom.
For the western, or for lack of a better word ‘democratic‘ outlook, Australia, New Zealand, France and Europe are leading the way with their technological system of vaccination check points and registered state/national vaccination status tied to your registration identification.
New York City joined the vaccine checkpoint process, as their city now requires the vaccine to enter all private businesses. Los Angeles soon followed.
The Australian electronic checkpoints are essentially gateways where QR codes are being scanned from the cell phones of the compliant vaccinated citizen. Yes comrades, there’s an app for that.
Currently, the vaccine status scans are registered by happy compliance workers, greeters at the entry to the business or venue. Indeed, the Walmart greeter has a new gadget to scan your phone prior to allowing you custody of a shopping cart.
In restaurants, the host or hostess has a similar compliance scanner to check you in prior to seating or a reservation confirmation.
It’s simple and fun. You pull up your QR code on your cell phone (aka portable transponder and registration device), using the registration app, and your phone is scanned delivering a green check response to confirm your correct vaccination status and authorized entry.
The Australian government, at both a federal and state level, is working closely with Big Tech companies (thirsting for the national contract) to evaluate the best universal process that can be deployed nationwide.
As noted by all six Premiers in the states down under, hardware (scanners) and software (registration) systems are all being tested to find the most comprehensive/convenient portable units to settle upon. Meanwhile in the U.S., cities like Los Angeles and New York await the beta test conclusion before deploying their own version of the same process.
In Europe, they are also testing their vaccine checkpoint and registration processes known as the EU “Green Pass.”
The “Green Pass” is a similar technological system that gives a vaccinated and registered citizen access to all the venues and locations previously locked down while the COVID-19 virus was being mitigated. What would have been called a “vast right-wing conspiracy theory” 24 months ago, is now a COVID passport process well underway.
As with all things in our rapid technological era, you do not have to squint to see the horizon and accept that eventually this process will automate, and there will be a gadget or scanning gateway automatically granting you access without a person needing to stand there and scan each cell phone QR code individually.
The automated process just makes sense. You are well aware your cell phone already transmits an electronic beacon enabling your Uber or Lyft driver access to your location at the push of a touchscreen button, another convenient app on your phone. So, why wouldn’t the gateways just accept this same recognizable transmission as registration of your vaccine compliant arrival at the coffee shop?
The automated version is far easier and way cooler than having to reach into your pocket or purse and pulling up that pesky QR code on the screen. Smiles everyone, the partnership between Big Tech and Big Government is always there to make your transit more streamline and seamless. Heck, you won’t even notice the electronic receiver mounted at the entry. Give it a few weeks and you won’t remember the reason you were laughing at Alex Jones any more than you remember why you are taking off your shoes at the airport.
However, as this process is created, it is worth considering that you are being quietly changed from an individual person to a product. Some are starting to worry in the beta test:
[…] “you must become an object with attributes sitting in a database. Instead of roaming around anonymously making all sorts of transactions without the government’s knowledge, Australians find themselves passing through ‘gates’. …
All product-based systems have these gates to control the flow of stock and weed out errors. It is how computers see things. The more gates, the more clarity.
You are updating the government like a parcel pings Australia Post on its way to a customer. If a fault is found, automatic alerts are issued, and you are stopped from proceeding. In New South Wales, this comes in the form of a big red ‘X’ on the myGov vaccine passport app (if you managed to link your Medicare account without smashing the phone to bits).
Gate-keeping systems have been adapted from retail and transformed into human-based crowd solutions to micromanage millions of lives with the same ruthless efficiency as barcodes tracking stock. There is no nuance or humanity in this soulless digital age. Barcodes are binary. Good – bad. Citizen or dissident.
Even if you have all the required government attributes to pass through the gates – two vaccines, six boosters, and a lifelong subscription to Microsoft – something could go wrong. If your data fails the scan, you’ll slip into digital purgatory and become an error message.
It could be problematic if your status fails to register correctly, or if the system identifies some form of alternate lifestyle non-compliance that will block you from entry. Then again, that’s what beta tests are for, working out all these techno bugs and stuff. Not to worry…. move along….
Then again… “For those in the privileged class allowed to shop, take note of Covid signs which encourage cashless transactions under the guise of ‘health’. Messaging around cards being ‘safer’ will increase until the Treasury tries to remove cash entirely, almost certainly with public approval.”
Wait, now we are squinting at that familiar image on the horizon because we know those who control things have been talking about a cashless society for quite a while.
We also know that data is considered a major commodity all by itself. Why do you think every system you encounter in the modern era requires your phone number even when you are not registering for anything. It, meaning you, us, are all getting linked into this modern registration system that is defining our status. We also know that system operators buy and sell our registered status amid various retail and technology systems.
Yeah, that opaque shadow is getting a little clearer now.
Perhaps you attempt to purchase dog food and get denied entry into Pet Smart because you didn’t renew the car registration. Or perhaps you are blocked from entry because you forgot to change the oil on the leased vehicle you drive, and Toyota has this weird agreement with some retail consortium. You head to the oil change place that conveniently pops up in the citizen compliance App –it’s only two blocks away– they clear the alert after they do the oil change, and you are gateway compliant again.
Missed your booster shot? We’re sorry citizen, your bank account is frozen until your compliance is restored… please proceed to the nearest vaccination office as displayed conveniently on your cell phone screen to open access to all further gates (checkpoints)…. tap to continue!
Vote for the wrong candidate? Attend, or donate to, a trucker protest?
Yes, it seemed transparently obvious where this was heading, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just awakened the masses:
Notes on the Society of Control.
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Monday, February 21, 2022
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Perfidious RINOs...
If you ask any vaccine skeptics about their objections to the vaccine mandate their answer usually is two-fold.
First, they are concerned about the effectiveness and side effects of the vaccine. The authorities are frequently redefining the term ‘fully-vaccinated’ by adding boosters also alarms them.
They are also troubled by government overreach. They realize that once freedoms and rights are encroached upon by the government, they are seldom fully relinquished completely.
The Biden administration has successfully mandated vaccines for health care workers, military personnel, and non-citizen air travelers, while their attempts to mandate the vaccine for federal government contractors and employees and private sector employees have failed. There have been proposals to vaccinate children, including those under 5.
State administrations have imposed restrictions on movement, access to public spaces, and public assembly. There have been instances of police arresting and fining individuals for merely attending a party or being part of religious gatherings.
While other restrictions can be undone over a period of time, the citizen understands that the vaccine once injected into your body will cause permanent changes.
Since the Democrats have been dogmatic about vaccine mandates, the people look towards the Republicans for support.
The good news is that some Republicans have been showing the way to challenge undemocratic mandates.
On Tuesday, February 15, Republican Sen. Mike Lee proposed an amendment to defund vaccine mandates for medical workers, military personnel, federal employees, etc.
Senator Lee distributed copies of a letter to his Senate colleagues on behalf of himself, and Sens Roger Marshall of Kansas, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Mike Braun of Indiana, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Ted Cruz of Texas.
The following is a key excerpt from the letter.“We have consistently opposed President Biden’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates, which would force millions of Americans to choose between an unwanted medical procedure and being able to provide for their families. For legal, constitutional, and policy reasons, we remain not only strongly opposed to the mandates, but also firmly convinced that the risk of inaction on our part is unacceptably high”The amendment received support from some of Lee’s fellow GOP senators; however, the support was not enough to pass the amendment..@SenateGOP has a very real chance of defunding @POTUS’s remaining vaccine mandates IF every Republican stays for the vote.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) February 17, 2022
Senator Lee’s amendment failed in a 46-47 vote.
A mere day later on Wednesday, February 16, Republican Senator Ted Cruz proposed an amendment to the budget that would block federal funding for schools and child care centers that mandate Covid-19 vaccines for children. It was a very astute proposition.
Cruz said the following while introducing his amendment:“Enough is enough. It’s time to stop the petty tyrants imposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates on families across the country. No child should be denied an education because of his or her personal medical choice. Schools shouldn’t get federal taxpayer dollars to trample on our constitutional liberties. It’s time for all of us to take a stand. Are you with parents and kids, or power hungry politicians?”Senator Cruz even tweeted a warning to Republican Senators not ‘skip town’ for his amendmentMuch like the support for Senator Lee’s amendment, Cruz’s fellow GOP senators’ support was not enough to pass the amendment.NO REPUBLICAN SENATOR should leave town this afternoon.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 17, 2022
Schumer is panicking right now because Dems WILL LOSE THE VOTE on my amendment & @SenMikeLee amendment to BLOCK BIDEN’s VACCINE MANDATES & BLOCK MANDATES ON KIDS.
The only way Dems win the vote is if Rs skip town.
Don’t!
Senator Cruz’s amendment failed in a 44-49 vote.
For both these amendments, the problem was with six GOP senators.
The usually suspect Sen. Susan Collins of Maine voted against the amendment; she was joined by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri.
Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma were absent.
Senator Graham is currently in the UK, focused on defending Ukraine and holding Putin accountable, his back symbolically turned:Next, 19 GOP senators voted in favor of averting a government shutdown, which means they handed Democrats more time to fund their anti-citizen agenda.Great meeting with my good friend, Prime Minister @BorisJohnson who is one of the leading conservative voices in the world.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) February 19, 2022
The US-UK relationship remains foundational to our foreign policy and who we are as a people. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/8mQN1FXFAJ
Last year, 80 House Republicans voted to fund the creation of a federal vaccination database.
All polls and trends suggest that the GOP will have emphatic wins such that they will have a majority in both the House and the Senate.
But power is meaningless if those who are in possession of it are reluctant to use it.
Republicans are aware that their constituents are deeply skeptical about the vaccines and want the ability to choose what to inject into their bodies, yet 2 among them sided with Democrats and 4 were absent. This is inexcusable; at this juncture, there shouldn't be a bigger concern for Senators than that of their constituents. These constituents are merely demanding the freedom of choice, which is essential in a democracy.
The Republicans must remember that in a democracy, the voter lends power to their representatives. This representative doesn’t own power, they are merely custodians of power. They are hence obliged to act in the interest of the people.
If the Republicans win majorities in both the Senate and the House in November, the people will have high hopes. If after that some among the Republicans side the Democrats for key issues and block the overall agenda of the people, there will come a time when the public will run out of patience.
The Republicans must remember that patience when needlessly provoked turns to fury.
Saturday, February 19, 2022
Justin Trudeau Orders RCMP to Trample Handicapped Fringe-NAZI Racist Protestors in Toronto
Police in Ottawa trampled protesters and then proceeded to defame the lady trampled by saying she threw her “bike” (disability scooter) at the horses. pic.twitter.com/yVj5P6tqrc
— Marie Oakes (@TheMarieOakes) February 19, 2022
Trudeau to Truckers: "We've heard you, now go home!"
I think that all Justin heard was some honking horns.
Friday, February 18, 2022
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Monday, February 14, 2022
Sunday, February 13, 2022
Saturday, February 12, 2022
Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine!
Parents Of Children Under 5 Disappointed With Delay For COVID-19 Vaccine Approval
Parents will have to wait a little longer for COVID-19 for their toddlers after Pfizer on Friday postponed its Food and Drug Administration application for kids under 5. CBS 2's Sabrina Franza talked with some frustrated parents.
---
Pfizer withdraws application for FDA approval of vaccine for kids under 5
Pfizer pulls its emergency-use application over insufficient data about the effectiveness of a three-dose regimen.
What a Coincidence!
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Hyper-Reality's Luxury Beliefs: The Values it Takes to be a Socially Acceptable Progressive Today
Robert K. Henderson is a doctoral candidate in psychology at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge who has written extensively on social class. He recently spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly about the admissions process at elite colleges, luxury beliefs, and how they apply to America’s status system.
You coined the term “luxury beliefs” as a new way of looking at America’s status system. What does it mean?
Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes.
One example of a luxury belief is “defund the police.” A 2020 survey found that the wealthiest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police. Since then, murder rates in the U.S. have soared. The poor—who were least supportive of defunding the police—have been the primary victims. The poor reap what the luxury-belief class sows.
I developed the concept after interacting with students and graduates of elite universities, and reading classic texts by Thorstein Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Fussell, and others.
In the past, the wealthy displayed their social rank with physical status symbols. As trendy clothing and other material goods become more accessible and affordable, less status attached to them. Luxury beliefs have arisen as a new status symbol.
In a recent essay, you wrote about your misgivings about the trend among elite universities of eliminating or minimizing standardized testing in favor of personal essays about overcoming adversity. What’s wrong with that approach?
Elite universities have decided to focus on adversity narratives to identify talented or extraordinary applicants. But ironically, the most well-off accentuate their marginalization more fluently. Truly disadvantaged people often have difficulty communicating their hardships in a way that the gatekeepers of elite institutions can understand.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that a recent study from Stanford found that college essay content correlates even more closely with family income than SAT scores. Presumably, applicants from affluent families are particularly adept at using the “right” buzzwords, slogans, and accounts of victimhood that please admissions committees.
Standardized tests are more objective than essays. A kid from a low-income background can more easily ace the SAT than master the tastes, conversational styles, and ever-evolving etiquette of the luxury-belief class.
On the one hand, as you write, schools are looking for applicants who propel themselves above their circumstances through personal initiative, and yet universities are now steeped in ideologies that emphasize how the marginalized are passive victims of their circumstances. How does this tension resolve itself? Or is the tension even felt?
One possibility is that this tension encourages a form of duplicity. Applicants may claim that systemic forces are working against them while simultaneously demonstrating how special they are for rising above those impediments. This could cultivate a potent blend of victimhood and superiority.
Often, it seems like people who are relatively fortunate stress their marginalization by co-opting the suffering of truly disadvantaged individuals. They then tell the most extreme version of what might potentially reflect reality, given whatever discernible characteristics they happen to share with those who have been historically mistreated.
Encouraging victimhood while rewarding those who claim to have risen above it also reinforces the existing system, such that the most advantaged people will continue to occupy the most elite institutions while thinking of themselves as somehow beleaguered. This in turn enables them to abdicate the responsibility that should come with immense privilege.
What’s the best book you read last year?
Tough to pick just one. Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng is definitely one of the best. It’s a haunting memoir written by a woman who was wrongfully imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in China. The events themselves are heart-wrenching, and the way Cheng describes the Communist regime’s psychological manipulation is both disturbing and illuminating.
Others books I enjoyed are Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, about the limits of human rationality and the importance of tinkering and experimentation; The Status Game by Will Storr, about how the desire for social esteem explains much of human behavior; and Codes of the Underworld by Diego Gambetta, about how criminals (and noncriminals) communicate information and establish trust under conditions of uncertainty.
You have a book of your own coming out this year, right? What can you tell us about it?
My forthcoming memoir is on track to come out late this year. I share my recollections of growing up in foster homes in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the trouble I’d get into as a kid, and the steps and missteps I took on my path to escape the drama and disorder of my youth. The book also contains some cultural commentary, reflections on childhood instability, and my observations about social class in America.
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
An Inconvenient Truth
Jerry Korth, "The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles"
America may be headed for a new type of energy crisis. While fracking technology still gives us relative energy independence, there is a distinct possibility that an electricity energy crisis awaits us. What if the demand for electricity significantly exceeds the supply over the next decade? We’d have soaring prices and rolling brownouts. That crisis could easily be triggered by the electric vehicles (EVs) Biden’s administration is pushing.
By his Executive Order and an associated Action Plan, Biden’s administration calls for 50% of all new vehicles sold in America by 2030 to be EVs. That means an additional 50 million new EVs on the road in the next nine years, all in an effort to lower Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, namely CO2.
On December 13, 2021, the administration announced its plan to spend $7.5 billion to construct 500,000 EV charging stations throughout the US. The plan’s funding comes from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure & Jobs Act Biden signed on November 15, 2021.
Then, on January 20, President Biden signed Executive Order 13990—Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis. This EO includes a wide range of environmental policies including vehicle fuel economy standards. The scariest of those policies is a set of new regulations from the EPA called SAFE, which stands for The Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Final Rule for Model Years 2021-2026:The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalize updated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas emissions standards for passenger cars and light trucks and establish new standards, covering model years 2021 through 2026.Fun Fact: These standards, imposed on car manufacturers, set the minimum average fuel economy limit (i.e., 40 miles per gallon) for their entire fleet of vehicles. A gas-powered fleet alone cannot meet these standards. Instead, car companies must sell more EVs to increase their fleet-wide average fuel economy. One way is to hawk EVs as more fuel-efficient.
On the EPA-mandated sticker on new EVs, you’ll see a fuel economy designation called MPGe (Miles Per Gallon equivalent). It’s usually greater than 100, making unwary consumers believe the vehicle is several times more fuel-efficient than a comparable gas guzzler. However, EVs are not really several times more fuel-efficient (but that’s a topic for another day).
Americans bought or leased about 15 million new cars and light trucks in 2021 and that number is forecasted to grow to 17 million by 2030. Assuming a ramp-up in EV sales from 2.3 million in 2021 to 8.5 million in 2030 (50% of 17 million), there would be 50 million more new EVs plugged into our electrical grid. The big question, then, is where vast amounts of so-called “clean energy” come from to charge all those EVs and what will it cost consumers.
Fun Fact: The current average price of electricity that residential consumers pay is $.14 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), although it varies from $.09 to $.23 per kWh based upon local supply and demand. Imagine if the price of electricity in your area increased by 50%. Or worse, imagine there is no electricity to heat and cool your home or…charge your brand-new EV.
Most major auto manufacturers (and a few trendy new ones) are rushing to market with all-electric vehicles. However, they are not spending billions on EV development because of consumer demand. Instead, onerous CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) and EPA imposed GHG emission standards force them into the EV market.
The NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) latest proposed CAFE standards directly respond to Biden’s Executive Order 13990 and call for a whopping 8% per year increase (up from the current 1.5% per year) in average fleet fuel economy from 2024 to 2026. That’s an average increase of 12 miles per gallon above the 2021 standard. Eventually, gas-powered vehicles alone won’t be able to meet these standards, making EV’s the only real alternative.
In the next few years, Biden’s administration will allocate $5.0 billion to individual states and award another $2.5 billion to selected contractors to facilitate installing 500,000 new charging stations. Simultaneously, the administration will use various regulatory means—e.g., CAFE standards, GHG standards, and EV tax credits—to put 50 million new EVs onto the road by 2030. Unfortunately, America won’t have the electricity needed to charge those EVs unless new and expanded fossil fuel-based power plants are built now.
The average EV consumes over 25 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical power to go 100 miles or 3,000 kWh to go 12,000 miles per year. That means an additional 150 billion kWh of electricity to charge 50 million new EVs. In 2020, total U.S. retail electricity sales to end-use customers were about 3.7 trillion kWh (3,700 billion kWh). An additional 150 billion kWh would be a 4% increase in total demand over the next nine years—just to charge new EVs!
America Electric Power Grid is already strained in many parts of the country. In 2020, our electric power generation makeup was 40% natural gas, 19% coal, 20% nuclear, 8% wind, 7% hydro, 2% solar, and 4% other fuel sources, meaning roughly 60% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels and another 27% comes from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. The administration doesn’t plan to build new nuclear or hydroelectric plants.
Fun Fact: America imports 47 billion kWh each year from Canada to meet peak demand. America’s largest natural gas-powered plants, like those in Gila Bend, Arizona, can generate 2.2 GW, and the largest coal-powered plants, like the Robert Sherer power plant in Georgia, can generate 3.5 GW of continuous electric power, at full capacity. But because electricity can’t be stored and, because the demand fluctuates dramatically with the weather and the time of day, power plants operate at only about 40% of their maximum output capacity, on average. Thus, a 2.2 GW plant operating at 40% capacity generates about 7.7 billion kWh of useable electricity in one year (2.2 GW x 40% x 8760 hours/year).
Wind and solar power will continue to grow but such power plants are not nearly large enough to provide the continuous power needed to meet the demand of 50 million additional EVs. For perspective, the capacity of America’s largest wind farm, Alta Wind Energy of California, is 1.5 gigawatts (GW) and the capacity of America’s largest solar farm, Solar Star of California, is .6 GW. Worse, they only generate electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines. Therefore, wind farms typically operate at less than 50% capacity and solar farms typically operate at only 25% of capacity A huge 1.5 GW wind farm (32,000 acres) operating at 50% capacity will generate about 6.6 billion kWh of useable electricity per year (1.5 GW x 50% x 8760 hrs./yr) and a huge .6 GW solar farm will only generate about 1.3 billion kWh per year (.6 GW x 25% x 8760).
Here’s the bottom line: There isn’t nearly enough electrical power available or in the pipeline to fuel 50 million new EVs by 2030. That would require an additional 150 billion kWh’s per year of deliverable electricity. Even the largest power plants only deliver about 8 billion kWh’s per year.
To achieve the administration’s climate change policy goals for EVs, America must build and commission about 20 large new fossil fuel-powered plants or several dozen large new wind and solar farms. That’s impossible by 2030 because large power plants take years to plan, build and bring online. Which means 2030 will either collapse the energy grid or result in a lot of cars that won’t go.
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Saturday, February 5, 2022
Friday, February 4, 2022
Farmers Join Truckers in Ottawa...
Sundance, "Ottawa Police Chief Promises to End Freedom Protest, Deploys 150 Additional Officers and Closes Transit Arteries to Isolate Protestors" | Feb 4 2022
Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly held a press conference on Friday announcing measures to combat the continued Freedom Convoy protests in the streets, and to block any additional protesting support from arriving. [Full Presser Here] In essence, the Ottawa police are going to use domestic terrorism authority against the Canadian freedom protest groups.
The outlined measures include deploying an additional 150 municipal police officers and undercover federal agents to infiltrate the protest and gather intelligence useful for the purpose of eliminating their effort.
Chief Sloly outlined that federal intelligence authorities will be “collecting financial, digital, vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status and other related evidence that will be used in prosecution.”
The jackboots will focus on using acts of mischief, hate, harassment, intimidation and other threatening behaviors, whether real or created by Canadian intelligence operations, to target the protestors.
Additionally, a “surge and contain” strategy will be used to isolate the protest in the red zone area in front of Parliament Hill. Ottawa police will use heavy concrete barriers as barricades, to create no-access roadways throughout the downtown core, and they will likely close highway off-ramps and bridges to stop additional support and/or protest groups from arriving.
The goal is to isolate the current protest groups, cut off their supply and support logistics and pick them off.
Further, any police officer who is caught aiding, assisting, supporting, sympathizing with or facilitating the ongoing freedom protest in the city will be removed from duty and subject to arrest. All Ottawa police officers are to regard the protesting group as an unlawful, extremist and hate-filled mob and have a duty to comply with the instructions of the command and control structure. WATCH:
Welcome to Canada folks.
This is what happens when we let the totalitarian state -and all the politicians who benefit from it- grow over years, unchecked, until it reaches a point where your freedom is doomed to perish.
Everyone in the USA should be paying close attention.
This is exactly how Fascism and Communism rise inside the walls of a previously free and independent system. Canada is the literal representation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The novel projects how the people of Russia Canada can so easily fall prey to a totalitarian regime while their dreams were for a freer country with greater equality.
The DC Honkening Begins...
Meanwhile in Ottawa...
Making January 6, 2021 look like it was something for Pikers...
Thursday, February 3, 2022
Denmark Ends Covid-19 Pandemic
...and Covid Variant Vaccines are becoming a complete WASTE OF TIME!!!!!!!
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Is Joe Biden Purposely Dumbing Down SCotUS and the Courts?
In making race and sex the paramount considerations for his Supreme Court nomination, President Biden will deal another blow to the quality of our most important institutions.
With the coming retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, President Joe Biden is poised to fulfill his campaign pledge to nominate a black female to the Supreme Court. It is worth revisiting, therefore, a little-noticed announcement from Biden’s second month in office.
In February 2021, the Biden administration signaled its intentions to lower the standards for federal judicial appointments. Traditionally, presidents have submitted their judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for evaluation before announcing their choice in public. The ABA assigned potential candidates scores of “well qualified,” “qualified,” or “not qualified,” based on research about the nominee’s legal competence, integrity, and temperament. A “not qualified” rating, though confidential, served as a de facto veto.
The White House Counsel’s Office disclosed in February 2021 that it would not involve the ABA in preclearance. Republican presidents have also cut the ABA out of the confidential vetting process in recent years, on the ground that the association was biased against conservatives. That charge was plausible. The reason that the Biden administration gave for sidestepping the ABA, however, strained credulity: The ABA was insufficiently attuned to the need for “diversity” on the bench. Allowing the ABA to vet candidates was incompatible with the “diversification of the judiciary,” explained a member of the White House Counsel’s Office.
The idea that the ABA is indifferent to identity politics is laughable. Its leading members are obsessed with the racial and sex demographics of corporate law firms and law school faculties. This is the same ABA that gave its highest rating to Supreme Court nominee Sonia (“over 100,000 children . . . in serious condition, and many on ventilators” from Covid) Sotomayor. It is a measure of how far the Biden administration intended to stray from even a diversity-driven standard of competence that it saw the ABA as a roadblock.
The Obama years, however, had revealed that the bar association’s expectations still possessed some remaining taint of meritocracy. The ABA rated a higher proportion of Obama’s judicial nominees “not qualified” than the nominees of Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, and of Obama’s successor Donald Trump. Most of those deemed not qualified were minorities or females, slowing down Obama’s own drive to “diversify” the federal bench.
Biden officials attribute the Obama nominees’ low scores to racial and gender bias. A more credible reason is that the Obama administration had lowered the bar for a judgeship beyond what even the ABA was willing to stomach.
An estimated 2 percent of the nation’s lawyers are black females. The introduction of any extraneous criterion for a job search lowers the average caliber of the potential applicant pool, by putting top contenders who do not possess the irrelevant trait out of reach. Contrary to the nostrums of diversity advocates, the role of a judge is not to “look like” this or that identity-based group; it is to apply the law as accurately and transparently as possible. President Ronald Reagan ignored that fact by limiting his 1981 Supreme Court selection to a female.
Biden’s race and gender restrictions are even more draconian, rendering 98 percent of all possible candidates beyond consideration because they lack “qualifications” that have nothing to do with judging.
Maybe, nevertheless, by some statistical anomaly, Biden’s severely constricted pool of candidates contains a disproportionate share of competitively qualified potential Supreme Court justices. From everything we know about average legal skills, however, the odds are against it, individual exceptions notwithstanding.
After the first year of law school, 51 percent of black law students rank in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students, according to a study of hundreds of thousands of student records from 90 percent of all accredited law schools and comprising 80 percent of all law students. Two-thirds of black students score in the bottom fifth of their class.
The author of that study, UCLA law professor Richard Sander, attributes that unequal performance distribution to mismatch: every remotely selective law school admits black students with academic qualifications on average vastly below their white peers. Mean black and white scores on the 2013–2014 LSAT were separated by 1.06 standard deviations, the Brookings Institution has found. In 2004, only 29 blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above on the LSAT, the average score for the most competitive schools, reports The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Whites were more than ten times as likely as blacks to score 170 or above. Yet those schools all admitted what they deem a “critical mass” of black students by race-norming their admissions standards.
The resulting skills gap puts preference beneficiaries at a competitive disadvantage in the classroom; they struggle to keep up with instruction pitched to students with more advanced academic skills. The consequences linger: blacks are twice as likely to drop out of law school as whites; only 45 percent of black law grads pass a bar exam on their first try compared with 80 percent of whites. Blacks are six times as likely to fail the exam after multiple attempts.
Acknowledging—even in private—the effect of mismatch on student performance can be professionally suicidal. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center was fired for a private comment lamenting that the black students in her negotiations seminar by and large clustered at the bottom of her class. Little did she know that her confidential observations to a fellow professor were being videoed. Inevitably, her remarks were posted on Twitter. Georgetown law dean Bill Treanor thundered that her comments were “abhorrent” and sacked her.
Treanor was following the pattern established by University of Pennsylvania Law School dean Ted Ruger in his treatment of Amy Wax: if a professor dares to mention the lackluster average performance of his or her black law students, accuse the professor of racism—but never refute the allegedly racist assertion with data to the contrary.
Treanor has again found himself “appalled” at a breach of mismatch taboos. Cato Institute vice president Ilya Shapiro was to assume the directorship of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution on February 1. Last week, Shapiro tweeted out that Biden’s race and sex preconditions for the Supreme Court eliminated the “objectively best pick” for Breyer’s soon-to-be-vacated seat: Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Though Srinivasan would have been the first Asian-American on the court, he “doesn’t fit the last intersectionality hierarchy,” Shapiro wrote, “so we’ll get lesser black woman.” In a follow-up tweet, Shapiro noted that Biden’s nominee would be dogged by the suspicion that she was selected on diversity rather than on merit grounds—a suspicion that conforms to all known facts.
Treanor labelled this latest mismatch infraction “appalling” as well. Though Shapiro has apologized for his “inartful” tweet, his new position at Georgetown surely is in jeopardy.
Our leading institutions—whether the bar, the American Medical Association, or universities—are fast becoming nonserious entities, frittering away our civilizational legacy in favor of the trivialities of identity. The State Bar of California is emblematic, as I discovered last week when renewing my bar membership. Lawyers licensed in the state must now take an “Attorney Census” before they can renew their license. Participation in the census is “vital in helping shape the state bar’s policies and programs for years to come,” the organization explains. Survey-takers can decline to answer the questions, but they must affirmatively opt out of each one.
So what information does the California bar seek in order to shape its legal policies: average wait time to get a court hearing? Length of trials? The rate of fee inflation and whether that inflation impedes clients’ access to due process?
No: the bar needs to know, as it puts it, which of the “following best fits with the gender identity you identify as [sic]: Female, male, gender variant/Non-conforming/Non-binary, Two Spirit, Not listed.” The bar also wants to know: “Which of the following best applies to you: Cisgender, Transgender, Intersex, not listed,” and: “How . . . you describe your sexual orientation or sexual identity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Heterosexual, Pansexual, Asexual, not listed,” among other identity-based queries.
It takes deep involvement in academic-inspired narcissism to imagine how bar policies could be affected by a survey showing that 0.5 percent, say, of attorneys in the state identify as “Two Spirit” or as “Pansexual.” What if the proportion were 2.5 percent—how would bar programs and policies change, compared with a merely 0.5 percent share? The State Bar deems such knowledge urgent, yet it denied access to its database of public records for a study of how racial preferences in California law schools affect student learning, something of much greater import to the future of law than the number of nonbinary lawyers.
The quality of our jurisprudence matters. The race, sex, and “gender identity” of judges do not. Private parties rely on an opinion’s clarity of reasoning to predict the outcomes of legal disputes. Some of the nation’s most complex moral and political questions have been addressed through the medium of legal decisions, especially from the Supreme Court. The quality of those decisions can strengthen or undermine the legitimacy of the law and of our constitutional order. Commercial matters can be nearly as complex, requiring the reconciling of competing statutes and regulations.
The law is not just about outcomes, contrary to contemporary discourse, which focuses exclusively on whether this or that justice will tip the balance on this or that policy. Under that contemporary perspective, the fact that Biden’s first Supreme Court pick will likely not change the overall ideological tenor of the court in the short term is viewed as more noteworthy than the fact that the new justice will help shape our jurisprudence for decades to come. Half of Biden’s picks for seats on the influential federal appeals courts—eight of 16 new appellate judges—have already been black females, presumably by virtue of the same irrelevant search restrictions. By making race and sex the paramount considerations for his Supreme Court nomination, Biden will likely deal another blow to the quality of our most important institutions—and with it our capacity to achieve excellence as a country and a civilization.
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