Unlike you’ll normally see from our usual contributor, (who has neglected to post an open thread in some time), I just have one entry in the OP. But it’s fully loaded. Anyone familiar with Intellectual Froglegs episodes will know that Joe Dan Gorman brings the humor, music, memes, and commentary. Many of his regular fans are calling this the best episode he’s ever posted, so give it a watch, and let us know what you think in addition to bringing your own contributions to the comment section.
President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump has been a long-time
activist in the dog rescue community. During a charity event for Big
Dog Ranch Rescue being held at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump walked in and
made a surprise visit. The audience cheered with a standing ovation.
“So, I didn’t exactly prepare for this,” Trump said.
“[But I was] walking by, and I hear everyone screaming, and I was like,
[‘What’s going on?’] and it was like, ‘We’re going to help dogs,’ and
that’s OK with me.”
“Biden Tells Nation There Is Hope After a Devastating Year.”
“Hopeful Biden Says, ‘I Need You.’”
“Biden Sets Vaccine Goal That Would Allow Americans To Gather By July 4.”
These headlines, from the covers of the printed New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe, greeted Americans Friday morning, 51 days into the Biden presidency and a full year into the beginnings of America’s long lockdown experiment.
“Seven Takeaways From Biden’s Prime-Time Address” topped CNN’s site. Chris Cillizza’s first two “takeaways”? “Donald Trump dug the hole” was number one. Number two? “A return to empathy.” Chris Cillizza, it’s worth noting, is a 45-year-old man and does not work for the White House.
“Last night is why Joe Biden won the presidency,” Politico Playbook opened with a straight face.
If you hadn’t watched the president’s prime-time address, you might think it was something — anything — other than the most depressing, defeated, and resigned speech since President Jimmy Carter held the office. You might think he hadn’t devoted his third sentence to a baseless attack on his predecessor, and the entire rest of his address to death, sadness, loneliness, and despair. You might think he hadn’t literally threatened the American people, warning, “We may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track, please, we don’t want to do that again.”
Rather, to read The Washington Post homepage’s featured commentary on the address, you’d think “Much of that speech was about hope.”
“It was about seeing a shaft of light at the end of a dark horror,” Robin Givhan, a 56-year-old woman who once won a Pulitzer for “witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism,” wrote. “His white French cuffs and his crisp pocket square,” she went to tell us, “evoked all of the institutional power and authority at his disposal to make things better.”
“[H]is mere presence on television,” she insisted, was a declaration of “his pride in the country’s progress.”
If you’re wondering why you didn’t see any of this, don’t worry: It didn’t happen. But more and more, we all have to take a step back, throw some water on our faces, and look around in disbelief at the state of our corporate media.
Take the other big story of the week: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson dared say that our country, faced with a vicious China growing stronger every day, shouldn’t pat itself on the back for its military featuring “maternity flight suits.” This is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said at all, but the Pentagon felt the need to react anyways, launching a full-on broadside on his heresy.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a veteran whose Blackhawk was shot down by insurgents, launched a fundraiser for her campaign called “F*ck Tucker Carlson.” The commander of Space Force filmed an unintentionally hysterical video on his webcam reminding his delicate troops that Tucker thinking pregnant women aren’t ideal fighting machines “is based off of actually zero days of serving in the armed services.”
So what does this have to do with corporate media? Reporters, in unison, chased the ball. And like that, just one day after the Pentagon (or someone at it) leaked the classified report showing the Chinese military dominating the United States in a Pacific war game, the news cycle changed to “Tucker Carlson Bad.”
Throw the ball and they’ll chase it. It’s a good trick. President Donald Trump knew it well, if he played it differently.
But that’s not all! This week also marks the Biden administration setting a record as the longest a president has gone without a press conference in an entire century. So do reporters even need a ball to chase? As we saw on the campaign trail and as we read Friday morning, the answer is no. While easily distracted from actual news, our corporate media is also perfectly content with, perfectly skilled at, perfectly shameless over crafting their new president’s propaganda for him basically regardless of what he says. The only question is, are you listening?
"The passion for destruction is also a creative passion"..Mikhail Bakunin
Article by Peter Skurkiss in The American Thinker
Destruction is the left's defining characteristic
The Democratic
Party has been captured by revolutionary leftists. This process
started in the 1970s and accelerated with Barack Hussein Obama being
elected twice. The takeover is now complete with the brazenly stolen
election of 2020, an event our "betters" demand we cease speaking
of. These leftists can rightly be called revolutionary Marxists — or,
if you prefer a softer term, progressives. Practically speaking, these
descriptions are interchangeable.
Most
Americans still do not accept who these leftists are and what their
objective is. This ignorance is fatal since knowing your enemy is half
the battle. Step one of enlightenment is to identify the defining
characteristic of these Marxists. Some say it's lying or perhaps hate,
violence, or the lust for power. All of those are indeed true, but they
are not the defining characteristic. That honor belongs to destruction, from which the other left-wing pathologies flow.
It
stems from a deep psychological impulse. The Marxists have long
abandoned the idea of a transcendent God. As such, they seek to build a
Heaven on Earth through human efforts and reasoning. Leftists see
themselves as standing for the future. This is what Marxian philosophy
calls the end of history.
The
problem the leftists face is that tradition, nationalism, and the moral
order are insurmountable roadblocks. The Marxists believe that these
matters cannot be sufficiently reformed to accomplish their ends. From
this springs the left's need — actually, its compulsion — to
destroy. The idea is that only from the ashes of what now exists can a
new foundation can laid for a properly structured society.
The
left damages everything it touches. Marxists have wrought havoc in
every country they've gained control of — Stalin's USSR , Mao's
China, Castro's Cuba, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and other lesser
ones. Closer to home, the universities and public school systems are
but a shadow of their former selves since coming under leftist
dominance. In the universities, standards have been lowered, free
speech all but extinguished, and non-leftist professors purged from
departments. In the K–12 public school, aside from de-emphasizing
academics, left-wing educrats actively work to dismantle merit programs
and now are using the Chinese pandemic as a pretext to keep the schools
closed, all courtesy of Democrat governors and
the teachers' unions. This is nothing short of the
deliberate destruction of Americans' educational institutions and the
future of our children.
The
left has degraded the entertainment world and much of corporate America
that is tripping over itself to appear "woke." The left has trashed
the reputation of once highly respected government institutions like the
FBI, the CIA, and Department of Justice, just to name three. Some
religious denominations have fallen under leftist sway and, like useful
idiots, march in lockstep to the progressive tune.
The
left corrupts the language. One now has to be careful of using the
pronouns "he" and "she." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is moving to
change the House rules to
be "gender neutral." This would call for the ban of all words relating
to familial relationships such as son, daughter, brother, sister, aunt,
uncle, husband, wife, etc. Even something as pure as mathematics
is under attack. Using their academic positions and convoluted
reasoning, Marxist academics argue two plus two does not have to equal
four. And what are the open border and the blanket amnesty policies of
the Democrats if not a deliberate attempt to destroy America by minting
tens of millions of new citizens out of the underclass of Central
America?
The
Democrats push the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate
Accord. Neither will do anything for the environment, but both will
further destroy the economy. These revolutions will not stop at
merely destroying the right to free speech. They also want to control
what people think, thus destroying our most intimate freedom.
Perhaps
most of all, the Marxists seek to destroy the family, as the family
unit is the glue holding society together. Their handiwork includes
eliminating prayer in the public schools, legalizing abortion on demand,
labeling pornography as free speech, equating homosexual unions with
marriage, and now codifying transgenders rights into
law. Virtuous traits such as thrift, hard work, merit, achievement,
respect for the family, and planning for the future are all denigrated
by the left as "white oppression."
To
conclude: Nowhere, at no time, has any leftist initiative made the
slightest improvement in anything it touched. But that was never the
real objective. The intent was always to destroy. It was bad enough
when the leftist assault on society was orchestrated by academics and
other far-out elitists. But now the revolutionaries have near complete
control of the federal government. That represents real power, the
power of the state. As the early days of the Harris/Biden
administration show, these revolutionaries are not shy about using that
power as they lay waste to America in their march to Utopia.
A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give.
By Dennis Prager.
To the students and faculty of our high school:
I am your new principal, and honored to be so.
There is no greater calling than to teach young people.
I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.
First , this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity.
I could care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships. The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity -- your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American.
This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans. If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity, race and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values – e pluribus Unum, "from many, one." And this school will be guided by America 's values. This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.
Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism -- an unhealthy preoccupation with the self -- while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interested in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you.
Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America 's citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here -- it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English -- but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school.
Third , because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning's elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.
Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school's property -- whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can't speak without using the f -word, you can't speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as "Nigger," even when used by one black student to address another black, or "bitch," even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.
Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way -- the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago -- by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight.
Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will be devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue. There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately fortunate -- to be alive and to be an American.
Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.
Few national policy issues have the long-term impact that immigration
does. It determines our future: Quality of our schools, livability of
our communities, solvency of our government, integrity of our civic
culture, cohesion of our traditions and understandings, size of our
carbon footprint, health of our infrastructure, equity in our labor
force, the viability of the rule of law, and just about anything else of
importance to the American people. Immigration levels determine
whether we can achieve population stability, or race toward an
unstoppable one billion by the end of the century.
So,
nothing is more heartbreaking than to watch critical policy choices
being made on a partisan and politicized basis in service of short-term
power objectives. That is the only explanation for the Democratic
Party’s complete abandonment of even the pretense of promoting the
public interest on an issue of such importance to our national cohesion.
The result is producing a national catastrophe of historic proportions,
and a train wreck of irresponsible leadership. A failure to uphold the
laws of the United States is a serious breach of President Biden's
fiduciary responsibility.
Somewhere around the middle of the
1990s, during the Clinton administration, something changed in the
Democrat Party. As trade agreements were signed and organized labor died
out as a political force, the Democrats decided that immigration
controls should no longer impede the quest to expand a needed
constituency for the future. Border controls were out, amnesty was in.
Since then, the unmistakable and polarizing trends have taken
us to today—to full on border anarchy. Picking up from the Obama
administration’s gradual capitulation to pressure for transformational
mass migration, the Biden administration has sealed the deal – declaring
a virtual end to immigration enforcement, and therefore immigration
limits. Biden is actually encouraging and promoting illegal immigration
as well.
The policies established since President Biden took over
are contained in an array of Executive Orders or Actions, and various
legislative proposals. But they are all geared toward the same
objective: Maximize migration by whatever means necessary. Unchecked,
the Biden administration will be adding more than 2.4 million foreign born a year and growing.
Democrats
no longer draw any distinction between citizens and those who turn up
here illegally and assert a nonexistent right to stay. They are not just
willing, but eager, to confer every other benefit or right conferred on
those with no right to be in the country.
Maximizing poor, low skill and poorly educated migration
in the 2020s will seal the deal: America, or what remains of it, will be
overburdened with the resultant inequities. Education will be
increasingly dysfunctional. Our politics, consumed with redistribution,
will no longer be nationally competitive in any major area.
The reckless policies of the Biden administration will all but ensure this sort of dystopian future. At a time when hundreds of millions
would like to move here, the president is abusing his executive power
to create a system that guarantees everyone who gets here every benefit
while eliminating any possibility of removal. Pandemic? No problem. You
are a visa overstay? Stay forever. Enter illegally? Stay forever. Fake
asylum claim? Stay forever. Get temporary protection until it’s safe to
return? Stay forever. Come as a minor? Stay forever. Foreign student?
Track to stay forever. Temporary worker? Bring in more, stay forever,
bring the family. Everyone here illegally? Bring the family. Let them
bring more family. Remove country caps and lift limits on family
migration.
Biden is inaugurating a permanent increase in overall
immigration with no end in sight. His goal? Promote permanent power for
one party while making Americans strangers in their own country.
Keep in mind that as a senator, Biden assisted
in creating the loophole that allows Central Americans to “abandon”
their children to get them in the U.S. and join relatives already here.
In effect, his law assists cartels in cooperating with the U.S.
government in a form of legally sanctioned smuggling. Under that policy,
once the cartels delivered their human cargo to our doorstep, the U.S.
government stepped in to deliver unaccompanied minors to their final
destination within the United States.
The fear always was that, as Biden had so little to offer in the way
of dealing with the pandemic and its economic fallout, he would mollify
his base on the cheap by giving away our land, jobs, and resources to
those with no right to be here -- without immediate cost to himself or
accountability for the consequences. Our fears were not misplaced.
The Trump administration demonstrated that immigration could be
managed through effective enforcement and deterrence. Biden considers
this cruel. No, what is cruel is sabotaging our immigration laws, and
stripping the American people of any ability to determine their future.
What is cruel is disparaging all our prospects in service of a craven
power agenda that will marginalize millions of Americans in an
identitarian utopia that will be anything but.
Since the courts
have amply demonstrated that they are prepared to invent new rights for
migrants in a non-stop parade of intrusive litigation during the Trump
administration, it remains only for the average American to stand and
watch his country betrayed by a lawless actor in the White House.
Joe Biden, a man who 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime infested with anti-American forces.
It is disappointing that the wave of national revulsion that must be rising up from the depths of American public opinion has not broken over the heads of the cancelers, statue-defacers, bigots, defamers of American history, and secular iconoclasts. Official committees in various cities, such as San Francisco and Chicago, recommend taking the names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other great American statesmen off schools (where teachers refuse to give up their paid vacations and go back to generally under-educating and often deliberately misinforming their students) and other public buildings. The waves of censorship are lapping at the feet of Shakespeare. Can the Bible be far behind?
Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services is a militant atheist and compulsive abortionist, responsible for the prosecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor for declining to pay the contraception, sterilization, and abortion expenses of those whom they employ or house.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denies a “crisis” exists on the southern border, even though illegal entries are well over 100 percent above figures from a year earlier, detention facilities are overflowing, and many new arrivals test positive for the coronavirus. The Democrats who lifted the level of the Rio Grande by several feet with their crocodile tears about Trump’s “cages” said to remind Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Auschwitz (and which were, in fact, erected by the Obama Administration) have reactivated the cages and done the Great Orange Monster one better by proposing to ship migrant children to Virginia in containers humanized by paintings of butterflies on their internal walls.
Climate czar John Kerry actually professes to believe that without drastic measures to restrain the use of carbon, the world will be on an irreversible march to the destruction of earthly life in nine years. His budget should be reduced by 99 percent, with the balance devoted to his psychiatric help.
Midway to 100 Days
There are many kooks, militant socialists, other-worldly faddists, and monomaniacs being packed into senior echelons of several departments, reflecting the ramshackle coalition that supports the administration. The president and his foreign policy team have professed a desire to return to the Iran nuclear agreement, though that country is deemed to be only months away from a nuclear military capability, and even if it adhered to the original terms, will have a green light to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles in five years. Since the ayatollahs evidently think that Biden, unlike his predecessor, is unlikely to interdict the course of the country’s nuclear military program with airstrikes, they are demanding the abandonment of U.S. economic sanctions before they reenter talks over resumption of adherence to the insane nuclear agreement that was the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. So far the Biden regime appears to be resisting this temptation with some fortitude.
At the midway point of the proverbial first 100 days, there is no indication at all that Biden will resist the pressures from the Left in his party. It is indicative of the desperate condition of the moderate American majority that Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is being touted as a bulwark of the Constitution defending the filibuster and the need for reasonable bipartisan support of legislation. If Manchin adheres to that stance after the full treatment from the Democratic congressional leadership, he will be the most distinguished congressional Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.
The administration appears to be unable to demarcate spheres of influence between the ecological zealots who shut down pipelines which are by far the environmentally safest way of transmitting oil and natural gas, from the agitations of the Democrats’ traditional supporters in organized labor who are not charmed by John Kerry’s breezy proposal that the more than 20,000 Keystone XL pipeline and offshore oil exploration workers who had been rendered redundant by executive order on Inauguration Day compensate themselves by putting in for unionized jobs making solar panels.
Biden’s defense secretary, General Lloyd Austin, tells us the greatest security threat to the United States comes from internal subversive organizations, and it is implied that these are white supremacists. Civil servants, like most American elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students, are taught the malignant critical race theory and it is legitimizing the monstrous self-directed blood libel that America is based on racial exploitation and was always a racist enterprise. There is not and has not been for many years the “systemic racism,” as even Biden now claims afflicts the country.
No Time to Weep
It is all mad and tends to confirm the fears of Abraham Lincoln, who famously said that no foreign army could “by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years,” that America “will live forever or die by suicide.”
The United States led the Western allies to success against Nazi Germany and the Japanese imperialists and it led the Western world to success in the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of international Communism. There followed a roughly 25-year hiatus before the Chinese threat was recognized, albeit as a distant and really only economic threat, when the United States was like the unbound Prometheus having vanquished every significant foreign enemy.
Francis Fukuyama wrote a persuasivebookthat history had reached its culmination with the triumph of democracy and the free market. In such times it was inevitable that complacency would arise. But it was impossible to foresee that blacks, after decades of immense gains and the consecration to their welfare of hundreds of billions of dollars, to say nothing of their elevation to the highest positions in the country—including the presidency—would deliver themselves in significant numbers into the hands of extremist demagogues prominent in the movement to tear down even the statues memorializing Frederick Douglass.
Joe Biden proclaimed on January 6, without evidence, that the vandals who stormed the U.S. Capitol were white supremacists. All bad people are racists and all bad things are racist. It is nonsense; a moron with an IQ in single figures could see clearly that all of this is a fiction. It is a good thing that Americans have come to realize that a great deal of their showmanship and self-puffery was an exaggeration of the country’s virtues and a whitewash of many inconsistencies in the nation’s history.
Every important nationality has a mythos, and there are generally fictions in all of them. But it is a shameful and outrageous injustice to denigrate the legitimate and uplifting ideals of the principal authors and continuators of the American experiment. Never in the history of the world has there been anything remotely like the rise of the United States from a few million settlers in two long lifetimes to worldwide preeminence. The United States has been the chief superspreader of democracy and the free market and every American should be proud of his country. Joe Biden, whom 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime that is infested by anti-American forces.
The attempted woke atomization of America into an immense congeries of irate complainant groups eventually will be overcome by Richard Nixon’s silent majority of decent and patriotic citizens who love their country. To borrow a phrase from George Orwell, “even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia” It is not time to weep for America, it is time to build it back much better than this tower of Babel and of self-hate that has slouched into office in Washington.
Fearing that incessant warnings about manmade climate cataclysms
would not be enough to end U.S. fossil fuel use, the Obama-Biden
administration instructed a special Interagency Working Group to concoct
a “social cost of carbon” concept. The SCC would “scientifically”
calibrate the dollar value of damages that a ton of carbon dioxide
emitted today in America would inflict on the USA and world in the
future.
The price tag was set at
$22/ton in 2010, raised to $36/ton in 2013, and just as arbitrarily
increased to $40, before finishing the Obama era at $51/ton. President
Trump disbanded the IWG and had the SCC slashed to less than $10/ton.
Within hours of taking office, President Biden resurrected the working
group, reinstituted $51/ton as a starting point, and directed federal
agencies to devise a definitive SCC by 2022.
This “updated”
version will reflect “recent developments in the science and economics”
of climate change, including the costs of other greenhouse gases, the White House said.
It will also factor in US commitments under the Paris climate treaty,
and especially “considerations of environmental justice and
intergenerational equity.” Climate “scientists,” economists, “ethics
experts” and “diverse stakeholders” will all participate in the process,
which many expect will devise a final SCC of $100 or even $200/ton.
The IWG methodology for developing SCC estimates is so
infinitely flexible, so devoid of any rigorous standards, that it could
produce almost any estimates that Biden and his climate czars
feel is needed. Adding “justice” and “equity” to the mix makes it
doubly malleable, doubly prone to abuse by an administration and
Democrat Party that are obsessed with “manmade climate change” (even
Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Defense appointees
must be committed to ending the “climate crisis”) and are determined to
make America “carbon neutral” by 2050.
Social cost of carbon is intended to advance that agenda and a 981-page “CLEAN Future” bill requiring that electricity generators provide 80 percent carbon-free energy by 2030 and 100 percent “clean” power by 2035.
Right now, over 80 percent of all US and global energy come from fossil fuels – and China, India and other countries
are building thousands of new coal-fired power plants, on top of the
thousands they already have. So even total cancelation of fossil fuel
use and CO2/greenhouse gas emissions by the United States would be
imperceptible and irrelevant amid the world’s enormous and increasing
levels of both.
Social cost of carbon is a key tactic in a war on
reliable, affordable American energy; on jobs, human welfare and human
rights; and on US and global lands, wildlife and environmental quality.
It will be used to justify raising carbon taxes and prices to at least $160 per ton of CO2 and imposing Covid-on-steroids lockdowns every two years,
supposedly to keep average global temperatures from rising more than
1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial/post Little Ice Age levels, which
alarmists claim would be catastrophic.
The SCC enables agencies and their allies to attach any price they wish to every conceivable cost of using fossil fuels: hotter and colder, wetter and drier climate and weather; more frequent and intense hurricanes; reduced agricultural output; forest health and wildfires;
floods, droughts and water resources; “forced migration” of people and
wildlife; worsening health and disease; flooded coastal cities; even
“reduced student learning and worker productivity,” due to warmer
planetary temperatures.
The SCC also lets practitioners completely ignore the obvious and enormous benefits
of using fossil fuels, and emitting carbon dioxide – such as enhanced
productivity via affordable air conditioning in summer and heating in
winter; improved forest, grassland and crop growth
(and greening deserts) due to more CO2 in the air; greater home and
human survival rates amid extreme weather events; and having the jobs,
mobility, living standards, healthcare and longevity of modern industrialized life.
In fact, hydrocarbon and carbon dioxide benefits outweigh costs by 50:1, 400:1 or even 500:1! Will Team Biden and others in the anti-hydrocarbon movement acknowledge any of this?
Unless compelled to do so by our courts, the odds are probably
500:1 against it. They won’t even admit that the sun and other natural
forces still play dominant roles in climate and weather, as they have
throughout history. In their minds, every SCC cost is directly and
solely due to fossil fuels. (For a reality check, read Indur Goklany, Patrick Moore, Gregory Wrightstone, Marc Morano and Jennifer Marohasy.)
In fact, eliminating carbon-based energy and carbon dioxide emissions will impose far greater human and ecological costs. It is fossil fuel replacements that will inflict incalculable damage to people and planet.
Replacing coal, oil, natural gas and internal combustion vehicles would require millions of wind turbines,
billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules, millions of
acres of biofuel plantations, a complete overhaul of electrical grids
and infrastructures, on millions of acres. That will require billions
of tons of steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, rare earth
elements, concrete, plastics and other materials – which will require
digging up and processing hundreds of billions of tons of ores and
minerals.
Under Team Biden, Democrats and Big Green, little of
this will take place in the US, under our rigorous laws and regulations.
It will be done overseas, in China, Mongolia, Africa, Bolivia – often
with slave and child labor, and with few or no workplace safety, air and
water pollution, toxic substances, endangered species or other rules.
Don’t their health, human rights and environmental quality mean anything?
The technologies may be clean and emission-free in the USA – but won’t be in any of these countries.
Even
manufacturing the turbines, panels, batteries and other technologies
will be done overseas – again with few or no pollution, health, safety
or fair wage rules – because expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent,
blackout-prone electricity will send America’s manufacturing and other
basic industries into oblivion, along with millions of good jobs.
Minority and blue-collar families will be hammered hardest.
The
proliferation of “clean, climate-friendly” wind and solar energy will
pummel wildlife and habitats. Wind turbines already slaughter a million birds and bats annually in the USA – far in excess of what Big Wind admits to – and that’s from a “measly” 60,000 turbines. The same thing is happening in Europe.
With the best wind sites being along migratory bird flyways, raptor
hunting grounds, bat habitats, and Great Lake and sea coasts, the
slaughter will get worse with every passing year. I just put new
bluebird, hummingbird and wood duck nest houses around my home and
neighborhood. It is terribly depressing that such efforts in suburban
areas will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of death in our wildlife
kingdoms. As forests, grasslands and deserts get torn up for turbines
and blanketed by solar panels and biofuel crops, mammals, reptiles,
amphibians, invertebrates and wild plants will also disappear.
Team
Biden, Democrats, Big Green and Big Media will loudly deny these
realities. They will insist that any wildlife losses are “inadvertent.”
As though the wildlife are less dead because it was inadvertent; as
though negligible inadvertent deaths from fossil fuel extraction and
pipelines were bad, but these are OK.
Wind turbines, solar panels
and batteries have short life spans – and are difficult or impossible to
recycle. Where will we bury millions of 300-foot-long
fiberglass-composite turbine blades? billions of solar panels? Will we
just keep sending solar panels overseas, where parents and children burn
them in open fires to recover the metals – breathing toxic fumes all
day long?
This is just the tip of the iceberg of adverse impacts
from SCC/Green New Deal policies. Any honest, accurate, complete social
cost of carbon analysis would require that every one of them be fully
accounted for, before we make any decisions on fossil fuels. Will
oddsmakers even take bets on that happening?
Will courts step up
to the plate? Will Republicans become better informed and more
passionate about our energy lifeblood, better organized, less focused on
simpler but less critical issues – and more willing to mount strong,
loud, principled opposition to this irresponsible insanity? Or will
Democrats just ram this through, because they can, because they
control the House, Senate, White House and Deep State Executive Branch –
perhaps with bare 1-10 majorities, but arrogant totalitarian control
nonetheless?
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In his address to the nation yesterday, President Joe Biden said if everyone is very good this year, he'll allow Americans to have some limited freedoms on July 4.
"If you are all good boys and girls, we can have a few freedoms back on the fourth of July," he said. "It'll be a nice treat for doing such a good job listening. Who's a good boy? You are, Americans!"
Some of the freedoms Biden says Americans will be granted will include the following:
Gathering in small groups of 1-3
Enjoying barbecued food as long as it's covered in hand sanitizer
Shouting "Freedom!" as long as you shout quieter than you speak and everyone is wearing masks
Launching government-approved fireworks that don't spread too much celebration and freedom
Waving flags as long as they aren't the American flag
Americans say they are very excited by the prospect of maybe being able to celebrate some limited freedoms this year as long as they are on their best behavior. "Thanks, government!" said one man in New York. "I'm going to do my best to follow the rules so that maybe the government will let me have some very limited liberties this year!"
It’s time for Red States to start nullifying federal law
As
we all know, the last election was a “tipping point” election on many
different levels. An election won with the use of illegal last-minute
changes to state election laws has led to a rogue regime that threatens
the very foundations of America. This is being achieved through highly
questionable executive orders, the decimation of the concept of national
sovereignty and an attack on fossil fuels, the lifeblood of our
economy. Moreover, Biden is converting our military into a social justice agency and transforming our intelligence services into witch-hunters for conservatives who dared to protest a stolen election.
More
alarming is the left’s goal to make its political power permanent by
granting amnesty to 20-30 million illegal aliens, granting statehood to
D.C. and Puerto Rico, expanding the Supreme Court, and normalizing the
censorship of conservatives, not to mention the institutionalizing of
election fraud, especially in key swing states.
There
is little doubt, if history is our guide, that should the left achieve
permanent political power, future elections will just become “show”
elections, our 1st and 2nd Amendment rights will be
diminished, if not gutted, and our economy will become permanently
stagnant as with all other socialist economies in the world. It will
be the beginning of the end of America as we know it.
A proposal to challenge this attack on our rights
Our Founders, however, were extremely wary of federal power and thus
created a number of checks and balances to counter it. One of them was
the ability by the states to “nullify” federal laws and even Supreme
Court decisions. As most conservatives know, nullification is when a
State decides to not abide by a federal law, regulation or even a
Federal court ruling by simply refusing to enforce it. This concept is
rooted in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which plainly states
that if the states, who are the creators of the federal government, have
not specifically given them authority, that authority rests with the
states and the people of the state:
The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
Over
the last 150 years or so, liberal legislators and judges have violated
the Tenth Amendment by illegally expanding the scope and power of the
federal government. We know that Federal power is limited because such
powers were actually “enumerated” or listed in Article 1, Section 8 of
the Constitution and include actions such as “To lay and collect
taxes,” “coin money,” and “raise and support Armies.” The federal
government was not given any role in education, health,
welfare, transportation, energy, or even with maintaining secure
borders. All those issues were left up to the states to decide. If our
founders wanted to expand the federal government into every area of our
life, they would not have specifically listed the very few powers they granted it.
Conservative constitutional scholars such as Thomas West, in his book, Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century,
documents that our Founders believed that if a “law is unconstitutional
and therefore void and of no effect, it is up to the states, the
parties to the federal compact, to declare it so and thus refuse to
enforce it.”
The
left will scream about such nullification efforts, but they have been
engaged in nullifying federal laws for years. For example, all state
laws legalizing marijuana are illegal since they’re in conflict with
federal narcotic laws, but states have simply refused to enforce
these federal laws and so have “nullified” them. Likewise, states
controlled by the left have allowed various cities and counties to
become “sanctuaries” in which they refused to abide by federal
immigration laws. And no, the Marines were not sent in nor did any
state or city even suffer the loss of federal funding.
It
is time our side use this tactic as a way of protecting our
constitutional rights. Here are some of the issues that could be
affected by the concept of nullification:
Nullify all 1st Amendment Restrictions. States should refuse to enforce all federal edicts and Supreme Court rulings that impinge upon the 1st Amendment protections of our religious freedom, such as efforts by radical gays to force churches, faith based adopting agencies, religious schools, colleges, and businesses to carry out a radical gay and transexual agenda.
Nullify all federal efforts to undermine the 2nd Amendment. States should nullify all federal laws that compromise the 2nd Amendment such as those being proposed by the Biden team.
Nullify open border policies. With Biden announcing his intent to grant amnesty
to all illegal aliens, combined with his hostility to border security,
expect the border to get out of control. Already, migrant caravans are heading to the border. States should nullify such pro-open border policies and use their resources to stop illegal immigration. The reality is that states were originally involved in setting immigration policy
and indeed, used to detain and deport illegals prior to the existence
of a Border Patrol or ICE. The only mention in the constitution
regarding immigration is "to establish a uniform Rule of
Naturalization."
Nullify the anti-police agenda.
During the Obama regime, his DoJ hamstrung city police departments all
over the country with phony “civil rights” investigations, resulting in
cities hesitant to arrest or prosecute violent thugs. With anti-police activists surrounding Biden, his administration will do the same,
thereby empowering leftist rioters in our cities. The founders never
gave the federal government a law enforcement role as they thought this
responsibility best be carried out by local police and sheriff
departments. States should resist and ignore all federal anti-police
regulations and DoJ harassment of local police departments.
Nullify all federal efforts to preserve fraudulent voting procedures.
Conservative states need to immediately take action on election fraud
and pass comprehensive voter ID laws, which, of course, will be attacked
by Biden’s DoJ as a “civil rights” violation. States also need to
remove the estimated 2-3 million illegal aliens from its voting rolls.
Indeed, a fact check site has documented that the millions of illegal
aliens are currently voting and may have thrown the election to Biden.
States need to stop disenfranchising its legal citizens and also purge
from its voter rolls dead people, repeat registrations, and those who
moved out of state.
Of
course, states will be reluctant to invoke nullification but the
alternative would be to watch our constitutional rights be trashed by
leftists. The MAGA movement in the Red States needs to became active in
urging legislators and governors to start reclaiming their
constitutional powers and begin nullifying illegal Federal law.
Once
states are engaged in nullifying federal laws, I believe we will
witness what I call the “great migration” in which conservatives will
leave blue states to live in red states and vice-versa. And yes, this
could lead to a peaceful balkanization of America in which the Red
states become redder and the Blue states become bluer, but this is not
our fault. It is the left that is assaulting our constitutional rights
and if conservatives desire to live in states that protect their
rights, then so be it.
Already, we are seeing some movement in the states on the nullification front. The Arizona Senate passed a bill that declares it will not enforce federal gun control laws. Oklahoma, South Dakota and North Dakota legislators have all introduced legislation that nullifies Biden’s executive orders.
Nullification
is simply returning America to its original system of governance in
which most governmental authority is decentralized to the states and
counties. The federal government can’t do much about it other than to
cut federal funding for some state programs, but perhaps the time has
come for states to do away with these federal handcuffs.
