Society in General

How Fake Addresses Get Blank Ballots and Covid Payments

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Another report by Jay Valentine on the abuse of government databases in his American Thinker article A Gigantic Egg All Over Brad Raffensperger’s Face.  The title refers to a statement by the Georgia Sec. of State saying anyone questioning the ERIC voter databases is “extremist.”  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Last week, when Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger publicly supported ERIC after it was tossed out of Florida, West Virginia, and Missouri, we issued the Raffensperger Challenge.

The Raffensperger Challenge is the application of Fractal analysis
to any entity that currently uses ERIC. 

Brad Raffensperger says anyone outing ERIC is “extremist.”  Today, two more extremists joined in: the secretaries of state of Iowa and Ohio.  Looks like lots of extremists showing up for work.

Much in our complex lives is a matter of opinion. Still, there are a few things that are a matter of data, and we are so looking forward to helping Brad Raffensperger, and the diminishing remaining Republican secretaries of state, see how useless ERIC truly is.

This week, we finished the first Raffensperger Challenge — in ERIC “cleaned” Washoe County, Nevada.  Let’s go there.  This is a county with about 600,000 people on the voter rolls.  Many are C = cancelled, others I = inactive.  Our friends there want to include all voters in the analysis, since we have such a deep history of secretaries of state converting inactive voters to “active,” voting them, and turning them back to inactive.

Every person on every Nevada voter roll we examined was “cleaned” by ERIC. Not a couple of them, not the left-handed ones, but every single voter was ERIC-certified as being a real person, protected by our laws and needs to vote.

We chose to use two data sources — both official — as our original data for comparison: the official Nevada voter roll, published by its secretary of state. We added the Washoe County property tax roll, published by the Washoe County tax authority.

We compared the address on the tax roll with the names and addresses on the voter roll:

    • People registered in vacant lots: over 4,200
    • Registered in hotels: over 2,000
    • Registered in parking lots: over 2,500
    • Registered in R.V. parks: 1,600

Amazing how voter rolls — cleaned by ERIC — grow voters like barnacles in hotels and vacant lots up to an even-year election date — then they disappear afterward. This is in the data!  We have the official tax records saying a “residence” is a field and the voter roll saying the same address is a residence — leaving off that it is a field.

Some states who use ERIC, like Arizona, allow people to register in hotels, and we are told some states, again Arizona, allow voters to register in vacant lots. Perhaps. We are further informed that some states, like Arizona and Nevada, allow the registration of “no known address.”

Voters are certainly registered there — at places that are no known address. If it is legal or not, we leave to others.   We have a much bigger story to share with you, dear reader: how do people in hotels, R.V. parks, vacant lots, and “no known address” get a mail-in ballot?  You cannot mail a ballot to a vacant lot — it doesn’t get mail. You can mail a ballot to the R.V. park, but the guy registered in 1991 — do you think he is still there in his camper?

In 2021, we worked with former sheriff Clarke and the Wisconsin team to find phantoms. Phantoms were found by the trainload; they were unfortunately not able to be taken off voter rolls.  In 2023, we are focusing on addresses — conveniently and precisely provided by widely available property tax records. We can now profile every address of every building in every city, town, or hamlet in America — down to square feet, number of baths and bedrooms, description, and category — updated monthly.

For every address in America, every single one, we can know with precision:

    • This address cannot receive mail (vacant lot, field).
    • This address can receive mail but not a ballot (bank, insurance company).
    • This address can receive mail, and a ballot, but it cannot receive a ballot for Jim Smith because Jim does not have his apartment number on his voter registration record.

Welcome to the Undeliverable Ballot Database.
Like it or not, the world of mail-in ballots is upon us.

State after state is registering 16-year-olds, and the registration becomes active when they turn 18. Every vagrant in every homeless shelter has at least one registration. We found, in Michigan, some people with 17 registrations.

The issue in 2024 is “who can receive a mail-in ballot?”  The presidency of the most powerful country in history rests on a single question: who can get a mail-in ballot?  Well, now we know. ERIC doesn’t.

We know with precision, or can know, for every physical entity in America, which is listed on a tax roll — even if it is not taxed, like a church — whether it can get a ballot or not. We now can determine in every multi-unit apartment building in every city in every state for every voter — can that person legally be mailed a ballot or not?

Having better technology than the government is a very entertaining experience — as we are learning in Washoe County, and as Brad Raffensperger is about to learn when we publish Brad’s Georgia tax comparison data. It’s really ugly — for Brad.

The Fractal team at Project Omega is working, again, with 14 states, many using ERIC, to deliver demonstration projects like Washoe County, Nevada. We have enough experience in most of these states from 2022 to know the end of the movie. Their voter rolls do not match their tax rolls — to a degree embarrassing to any secretary of state.

There’s more:   $$$$

Three county sheriff’s departments contacted our team because they were interested in this kind of voter fraud — registered voters in vacant lots. They each, separately, performed other analyses and found that vacant lots had accumulated fraud.

Many of those addresses harbored clearly fake voters — or real voters who were not there. When they ran those addresses against the PPP (Payroll Protection Program), where Biden gave out free dough — guess what! You got it! Those address might not be able to get mail, but somehow, they got the dough!

An intrepid team in Florida, working with law enforcement, found some of those scammy addresses harbored “contribution mules.” The contribution mule is the guy who has no discernible wealth but makes 4,000 donations a year, to candidates all over the country, in $50 increments. So where does that guy get his dough?

ERIC protected voter rolls from scrutiny for years. The Gateway Pundit guys busted the gig with their reporting. The Fractal team started showing voter teams how inaccurate ERIC really is.

Now the game is up. ERIC is bleeding clients. It’s just a matter of time until they are running lefty states with zero credibility.

So next time you get depressed because the good guys never seem to win, check in on ERIC and smile as you see it bleed into obscurity.

 

 

Fed Reserve Hijacks US Democracy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For those who missed it, Simon Black explains in his blog article The Federal Reserve just hijacked American democracy.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

It was only Tuesday of last week that the Fed Chairman testified before a committee of concerned senators who thought the Fed may be tightening monetary policy (i.e. raising interest rates) too quickly.  This was a valid concern; rapid interest rate hikes DO create a LOT of risks. And one of those risks is that asset prices– especially bond prices– plummet in value.

And yet last week the Fed Chairman completely rejected this risk, telling worried senators flat out that “nothing about the data suggests to me that we’ve tightened too much. . .”  In other words, he believed the Fed’s rapid interest rate hikes posed ZERO risk.

Talk about a terrible prediction; just THREE DAYS LATER, one of the largest banks in the US imploded, multiple bank runs unfolded across the country, the bond market fell into turmoil, and the Fed had to essentially guarantee the entire US banking system in order to restore confidence. (More on that in a moment.)

The mental image of bank runs in America, just days after the Chairman dismissed
any risk, is the Fed’s equivalent of the Afghanistan debacle. It’s shameful.

But what’s REALLY concerning is the Fed’s response to this panic– their de facto guarantee of the entire US banking system. Because ultimately they just put YOU on the hook for the potential bond losses of every bank in America. I’ll explain–

So when the FDIC decided to guarantee every depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, including those with balances exceeding $250,000, it means they’re bailing out SVB’s wealthy customers at the expense of big Wall Street banks.

But most people seem to have missed the real story…
because the ACTUAL bailout is coming from the Fed, not the FDIC.

Despite the Chairman’s terrible prediction in front of the Senate Banking Committee last week, the Fed now seems keenly aware of the risks in the US banking system. They realize that there are LOTS of other banks that are sitting on massive unrealized losses, just like SVB.  So in order to prevent these banks from going under, the Fed invented a new facility they’re calling the “Bank Term Funding Program”, or BTFP.

But the BTFP is really just an extraordinary lie designed to make you think that the banking system is safe. They might as well have called it, “Believe This Fiction, People”, and I’ll show you why.

How Bank Credit System Works

Whenever people borrow money from banks, we normally have to provide some sort of collateral. Banks make home equity loans using real estate as collateral. They make car loans where the car is collateral. Manufacturing businesses borrow money using factory equipment as collateral.

Well, banks do the same thing when they borrow money. And sometimes banks will even borrow money from the Federal Reserve. This is actually one of the reasons why the central bank exists– to act as a “lender of last resort” if banks need an emergency loan.  And when banks borrow money from the Fed, they have to post collateral too.

Instead of automobiles and houses, though, banks use their financial assets as collateral– specifically their bonds.  This is actually codified by law (12 CFR 201.108) whereby Congress lists specific assets that the Fed can accept as collateral when making loans to banks. The list is basically different types of bonds.  But this is the root of the problem. Banks are in financial trouble because their bond portfolios have lost so much value. Some banks (like SVB) are even insolvent because of this.

So now, through the BTFP, the Fed will now accept banks’ sagging bond portfolios
as collateral, but loan the bank MORE money than the bond portfolios are worth.

Let’s say you’re an insolvent bank that invested, say, $100 billion in bonds. Those bonds are now worth $85 billion, and your bank is about to go under. “NO PROBLEMO!” says the Fed.  The bank simply posts their bond portfolio (which is only worth $85 billion) as collateral, and the Fed will loan the bank the full $100 billion… as if those losses never occurred.  It’s a complete lie. Everyone is pretending that the banks haven’t lost any money to give you a false sense of confidence in the financial system. “Believe the Fiction, People.”

Remember that banks in the US have more than $600 billion
in unrealized bond losses right now.

And that number will keep increasing if interest rates continue to rise.  So this means that the Fed has essentially guaranteed that entire $600+ billion. Commercial banks won’t lose a penny— they can now pass their financial risks down to the Federal Reserve.

This isn’t a bailout… it’s a time bomb.

We can keep our fingers crossed and hope that this time bomb never explodes. But if it does, the Federal Reserve is going to be looking at hundreds of billions in losses… which would trigger devastating consequences for the US dollar.

This means that everyone who uses US dollars… including every man, woman, and child in America, is ultimately on the hook for the potential consequences of the BTFP.  And that’s what is so remarkable about this: the Fed just made this decision all on its own.  Congress didn’t pass a law. There were no hearings, no judicial oversight, no votes.

Instead, several unelected bureaucrats who have been consistently wrong
got together in a room and decided to guarantee $600+ billion in bank losses…
and stick the American people with the consequences.

      • This is the same organization that said in February 2021 that there was no inflation.
      • The same organization that said in July 2021 that inflation was transitory and would pass in a few months.
      • The same organization that said in June 2022 that they finally understand “how little we understand about inflation.”
      • The same organization that said THREE DAYS before SVB’s collapse that “nothing about the data” suggested any risks with their policy actions.

The Fed has been wrong at every critical point over the past few years. And they’ve now unilaterally signed up every single person in America to a $600+ billion bank bailout without so much as a courtesy phone call to Congress.

This is apparently what Democracy means in America today.  We’ve all been subjected to endless vitriol over the past few years with people on all sides howling that “Democracy is under attack.”

Well, we just watched an unelected committee of central bankers hijack democracy
and stick the American people with a potential $600+ billion bank bailout.

 

 

Would-Be Lawyers in Need of Disclosure

Posted on by Ron Clutz

We are seeing lately that distructive social behavior bears no consequences to the perpetrators when it suits the agenda of institutional powers, and can even be celebrated and encouraged when it serves a partisan cause.  Prime example is the debacle at my alma mater Stanford when the free speech rights of a senior judge were cancelled by law shool students, aided and abetted by a DIE dean.  Charles Lipson is concerned about future lawyers substituting their personal preferences for constitutional rights and freedoms.  He proposes a means of restoring demeanor and accountability in his Spectator article How to stop law students from blocking free speech.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Let employers and state licensing boards know what they did

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.

Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate. That’s a very big problem since those are the very essence of higher education in a democracy.

These metastasizing DEI bureaucracies endow political ideologues with unchecked power over students’ lives and campus activities. The episode at Stanford shows how they use it. That needs to be fixed. One path to doing that (and lowering the cost of higher education, now encumbered by top-heavy administrative structures) is to abolish the entire DEI apparatus.

The victim at Stanford was federal appellate judge Kyle Duncan
and all the students who came to hear him.

True, the university later apologized, but that’s just cheap talk unless it is followed by serious actions against the disruptive students and the administrator who failed in her basic responsibility. Of that, we have heard nothing. Only the naive expect much better from Stanford (or Yale, Harvard, Columbia and dozens more). Stanford students are so committed to their illiberal views, so cloaked in moral righteousness, that they actually protested the dean even issuing an apology.

“Hecklers’ Vetoes” like this would be bad enough if they were rare. They aren’t, even at law schools, where an appreciation of the First Amendment should be foundational. Such disruptions would be even more prevalent if these institutions invited speakers whose views challenged their students. They seldom do.

Yet intellectual challenges — from professors, invited speakers, fellow students and assigned readings — are essential to a good education. That point was put perfectly by Hanna Holborn Gray, a distinguished historian who once headed the University of Chicago. “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think,” she said. “Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” The hecklers’ veto rejects her profound insight. So do the administrators who tolerate it.

It shouldn’t take a PhD to understand why Professor Gray’s point is vital to higher education. It shouldn’t take a legal education to understand why free speech is vital to our democracy. It is essential for students, faculty and administrators to understand that value and to go beyond an abstract understanding and implement it in practice. That means students don’t have to attend speeches if they don’t want to, but they have no right to prevent others from attending or listening to them. That means students can demonstrate their opposition to a speaker outside the auditorium, but not inside. That means they are welcome to hold their own events, but not to block others from holding theirs. That means they should never prevent an invited speaker from making her case and never prevent her audience from listening and reaching their own, independent conclusions.

That means students, faculty, and administrators who cross those red lines
are undermining basic values in higher education
and should face serious consequences.

Fortunately, there is a straightforward way to stop this mischief, at least in law schools, and to underscore the importance of free speech on campus. If students are found to have disrupted a speaker (after a fair hearing, in which they can defend themselves), they should face a simple penalty: disclosure.

Disclosure means that information should be included in a student’s record
and available to anyone who legitimately seeks it.

If a law firm requests the student’s record, for example, the firm should be informed that the student was found guilty of obstructing free speech on campus, in violation of the speaker’s First Amendment rights and the university’s own rules. The same disclosure should be provided to state bar associations, which seek those records as part of their licensing requirements. Prospective employers and bar associations can use that information as they see fit.

The university should let students know these rules and expectations in advance. They should be stated clearly in the students’ letters of acceptance. They should be told that, if they come to this university, they cannot disrupt events on campus and will face serious consequences if they do. That point should be repeated during orientation sessions and enforced by disciplinary committees.

The goal is deterrence, not punishment. In a better world, that threat wouldn’t be necessary to prevent the heckler’s veto. Students wouldn’t need it to behave like decent citizens in a democracy. They would have internalized these fundamental principles long ago. Since some students clearly have not, they need to understand that bad behavior comes with bad consequences.

The simplest, most effective consequence is transparency. Let anyone who seeks their academic records know what a disciplinary board has found. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, “Depend upon it, sir. It would concentrate their minds wonderfully.”

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.

Canada: No Border, No Nation

Posted on by Ron Clutz

When I emigrated decades ago from Boston and settled in Montreal, I learned many things. One surprise was discovering the underground railway that transported black slaves from southern US had some ending up in Montreal. It seems that some freemen got jobs as porters on the actual railroad linking New York with Montreal. They discovered that the prejudice was much less than in the US, and began to make their homes north of the border. Thus, a black community formed which became a base to welcome immigrants from Caribbean countries, as well as Africa itself and other places. So for more than a century, Montreal has had a vibrant black community with a wide mix of national origins, and of course additional generations born and bred here. Currently, our hero tennis player is Felix Auger-Aliassime, who does us proud every time he steps on the court.

Now, in 2023, we have a strange upside down transportation of illegal aliens (including not only latin americans, but chinese and drug mules, and God only knows who else. Because our fearless PM, Justin Trudeau, long ago decided that Canada is “post-national.” In other words, in true global socialist fashion, Canada is (in his mind) a place without borders, where anyone has the right to come in and take advantage of the social safety net and government largess.

An officer speaks to migrants as they arrive at the Roxham Road border crossing in Roxham, Quebec, Canada, on March 3, 2023.

The symbolic portal for this intrusion of aliens is Roxham Road, south of Montreal, where entry controls have been relaxed, similarly to the US border with Mexico. From CNN:

On a snowy March afternoon, a small convoy of taxis and hired cars rolled north along a New York country road that dead-ends at the Canadian border. Among those onboard: a Nigerian family of five, a Russian man traveling alone and a tearful South American woman named Giovanna.

“I also believe I’ll have a better quality of life in Canada, and I have some family there,” said Giovanna before walking up to the invisible line in the ice that’s guarded by Canadian authorities at a makeshift post. CNN is not using her last name because of threats she says were made against her in Colombia.

“Hello madam. How are you?” asked a Spanish-speaking Canadian officer on the other side. “You cannot enter Canada here,” he informed Giovanna. “If you do, we will arrest you. Understand? You decide.”

Giovanna responded by taking five steps into Canada where officers then informed her of her rights and processed her for unlawful entry, a process which usually ends with the defendant being released into Canada to petition for asylum.

The twist is, unwanted intruders in Texas are taken north to New York (among other places), and now New York buses them to Roxham Road. And so these arrivals begin their stay in Canada with the criminal act of crossing a border, even though the Feds refuse to enforce it. How likely is it that other criminal behavior will occur? How likely that Canadian traditions of lawful, tolerant and industrious behavior will be manifest in these newcomers? How long will proud Canadians accept to be a dumping ground for illegals by way of the US?

Additional context is provided by Brian Giesbrecht  in his article Most Canadians Don’t Think Canada Is a ‘Post-National State’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

When newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a bewildered Canada in 2015 that Canada was a “post-national state” not many of us knew what he was talking about.

Doesn’t “post-national” mean that Canada was once a nation, but no longer is one? Was he really saying that Canada was no longer a nation—that it had somehow graduated from nation status to some higher stage?

He didn’t explain, but perhaps what is happening now at Roxham Road can be at least partly explained by Trudeau’s unusual conception of what the country he is governing is all about.

At Roxham Road illegal immigrants simply walk into Canada with no permission to do so. Unlike the thousands of people waiting patiently in foreign refugee camps and poor villages who have filled out immigration forms, and complied with the many other requirements for formal admission to Canada, the Roxham Road crossers simply arrive on Canada’s doorstep with suitcases in hand—and walk in.

They are not refugees fleeing persecution. They are economic migrants residing in the United States. In many cases, their transportation to the border has been provided by American officials.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the Roxham Road migrants are probably good folks, just trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. But the fact is that they are taking the place of those who have done everything right, and have been carefully vetted by immigration officials.

The Roxham Road people haven’t been vetted at all. We have no idea
what their qualifications—or criminal records—look like.

Past governments, Liberal and Conservative, insisted that potential immigrants must follow the rules. They also believed in borders.

So, why does the Trudeau government completely depart from past practices and allow these people to simply walk into the country? The only possible answer I can see is Trudeau’s truly strange belief that Canada is a “post-national state,” and no longer a nation.

Because a state that is no longer a nation no longer needs borders. To Trudeau, borders seem to be simply an anachronism; a vestige of more primitive times. If the world is evolving from nation-states to one big—what, I’m not quite sure—we no longer need outdated concepts like borders and border controls.

We now know that “borders are bad” is just one of the World Economic Forum (WEF) talking points that Trudeau subscribes to. “Fossil fuels are bad” is another. Trudeau is one of the junior “philosopher kings” of that organization and appears to fervently believe in everything they preach.

But something I’m pretty sure of is that most Canadians do not believe that Canada
is a “post-national state” that no longer needs border controls.

Most Canadians believe that our previous immigration policy was basically sound. We need immigrants, but applicants should be carefully vetted, and only those with the necessary qualifications should be admitted. People who don’t even bother to apply—who simply show up on our doorstep—should be refused entry.

Trudeau is perfectly aware that a policy of allowing anyone entry to Canada, no questions asked, is unacceptable to voters. Yet, he does it anyway. Is this the new method of governance by which “post-national states” will be governed from now on? An organization of philosopher kings who are not accountable to voters will make the rules—rules voters would never stand for. And “Manchurian Candidates,” like Trudeau, will slip their policies into place?

Is this how obviously problematic policies, like “Just Transition”
and “Carbon Zero” will get past voters?

Recent revelations about election interference and infiltration of our systems at all levels by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) make Trudeau’s view that Canada is a “post-national state, with no core identity” even more ominous.

Canadians know who we are and what we are. We are a proud nation. A nation with borders.

 

 

 

Climate-Cancelled by a Friend

Posted on by Ron Clutz

I have a long-time friend and tennis partner who posted a comment on his Facebook wall yesterday, to which I posted a reply.  An hour later my comment was gone.  So I made another comment:

“Hey *******, my comment disappeared. Shall I post it again, or are you objecting to it?”  So far no reponse.
(Update:  Now my question is gone as well, so yes, he objects to my comment and erased it.)

Below is most of what he wrote, followed by my response.  Judge for yourself if I was disrespectful or merely being contrary, or in fact proposing an important alternative point of view.

Facebook Post by My Friend

After years of studying Human Nature, I’m now pretty sure that we are going the wrong way toward saving the planet because we simply can’t be proactive. It’s not who we are. Unfortunately, real change is seen by most of us as a menace. So instead of making the hard decisions, we try to make changes as painless as possible. As a consequence, we fail to make real changes. Meanwhile, we are destroying our children’s legacy. Your legacy. To be blunt, we have failed you. Not intentionally, but nevertheless, the damage is progressing. Regardless of your age, you know that as well as I do.

I can see priorities

I can see them all around me, here at home, in my province, my country and on this and every other continent. It looks like most nations are struggling with important priorities other than the planet such as poverty, discrimination, disease, desertification, famine, overpopulation, war, rule of law… to name a few. Those are, for better or worse, adult priorities.

Short term issues for adults and legacy issues for young people

While adults are struggling to keep things going, not breaking down and turning our lives upside down, young people are noticing that their future is being compromised. Two segments are in play: adults and young people. They are heading in different directions. That’s not a problem, in fact it’s a good thing. I call it the evolutionary gap. It’s a natural biproduct of generations living and dying. Call it evolution. Call it the survival of our species. Regardless of how you may wish to describe it, with each new generation of boys and girls, the reshaping of our future is triggered. We adapt and we survive.

However, this time, will we adapt fast enough?

Whether you’re in high school, a technical school or a university, what should you do?
Because adults are not going to do the right thing quickly enough, the world will need you to nudge, to push, to jolt and to shove adults in the right direction. You must help them reorient and focus their priorities.

Here are a few suggestions: every Canadian high school, technical school and university should reserve one day every week to do the “pushing” around. Perhaps we should focus our teaching and research programs toward finding ways and means to accelerate the changes required to stop climate change before it becomes irreversible. Perhaps, we should close all high schools, technical schools and universities for a semester or two, or three, to provide our youth with the time to deal with adult priorities and claim their legacy now, while it’s still possible.

It’s clear to me

I have a notion that the future of our planet depends on what young people will do today. Now. As I said earlier, if we think about it, adults are too busy taking care of now and not of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s their job.

Question to the young
So, what are you going to do?

My Facebook Comment in Response

On the other hand, it does not take someone with a degree in psychology to understand why children are depressed about the climate or starting a family. Every day, children are told by Trudeau, Harris, Biden, most journalists, entertainers, and other nihilists that humanity’s use of natural resources is destroying the planet and overpopulation is a dire threat to us all — impending doom and apocalypse is always just around the corner. Our “leaders” use words like “emergency”, “catastrophe”, and “crisis”. Girl Scouts dole out patches to girls as young as five that depict sad polar bears floating away on tiny, melting chunks of ice, and the media runs images of smoggy dystopian cityscapes, or just plain invention, deeply freakish in nature.

Our children are told the lie that species are dying rapidly because of humans. They are told that too many humans are breathing out too much CO2, and in turn, that clear, innocuous, non-pollutant gas is heating up the planet and causing the existential threat of “climate change.”

Why wouldn’t they be depressed if those talking points are all they hear? They are indoctrinated that the science is settled and anyone who dares tell the truth that the climate is and has always changed cyclically and naturally is a climate change denier who shouldn’t be taken seriously. They are taught to repeat what they are told instead of to ask questions or do research.

Liberals and Democrats seek to scare the public every day about a coming cataclysmic event — whether it’s an ice age or a burning hellscape they aren’t sure — by saying we only have a few years left. Then, they pretend they don’t understand why people, including children, are depressed.

It’s true that the future will be invented by the next generations, but the kids are not alright. Let’s hope, for their sake, that enough of them are able to rise above the rubbish stuffed into their heads, that they can address real problems instead of imaginary ones.

Footnote:

(Question to then IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri) “What do you see as the next tools you could utilize to create change?
(Pachuri Response) “Children. I think we have to sensitize the young and tell them how their future is going to be affected if we don’t take action today. I think if we can get them to understand the seriousness of the problem they would probably shame adults into taking the right steps.”

Update March 14: 

My friend phoned me yesterday saying he had not seen my comment, only my question about it.  Apparently there was some glitch in Facebook.  He asked me to repost, so I did.  Of course he disagrees with much of it, but he’s pleased to have a contrary opinion there.

I should note that my friend does at times say and write things to be provocative, and he knows me well enough not to be surprised at my counter POV.  So it shows that being needed as a tennis partner gets me latitude to have a maverick opinion.  In organizations, this is called “eccentricity credits” extended to persons with indispensible abilities.

Many years ago, a CEO famously said, “Corporate cultures don’t exist.  They were invented by consultants to make money.”  However, more recently, Corporate HR departments have become hives of DIE activists, and there’s no margin for not conforming to the ideology.  Maybe it confirms what the CEO said, when you see that DIE staff at universities are paid more than professors.

Far-Left activist and intolerant bully Tirien Steinbach, who is also Stanford’s associate dean of “diversity and equity,” attempts to shut up guest speaker Fifth Circuit Judge Duncan.

Stanford Univ Issues Apology for Disgusting “Equity and Diversity” Dean Who Ambushed and Bullied Trump-Appointed Judge During Speech He Was Invited To Give To Immature Law Students Who Shouted Him Down

Climate Realist for Canada PM, Please!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Published at CO2 Coalition A Plea To Pierre Poilievre, A Climate Realist for Prime Minister of Canada by Ron Barmby.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Dear Pierre,

There will probably be a federal election in Canada in the coming months as Justin Trudeau’s government is in a minority position with waning support.

His past three successful elections have all included fighting climate change as a key and winning platform. His current legislative agenda indicates his next campaign will have the same focus.

As Leader of the Official Opposition [pictured above], and in the best position to form a new government, you are currently advocating eliminating Trudeau’s national carbon tax and “letting technology handle CO2 emissions.”

That is probably a strategy to avoid playing to Trudeau’s strength, which is instilling fear of climate change in the voting public. But you could take it further by highlighting Trudeau’s main climate weakness: he misrepresents or is willingly ignorant of, the science of climate change.

Election campaigns require talking points, but I can offer you the following thinking points on the science of climate change that I hope you will find useful.

1500+ Scientists agree and disclared No Climate Emergency

1500+ Scientists Agreed and Declared No Climate Emergency

The Climate Changes but There Is No Climate Emergency.

Trudeau’s declaration of a national climate emergency is based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasts of between 2.5°C and 3.5°C warming between now and the year 2100 (intermediate and high emissions scenarios).

If those forecasts—which are not compliant with the scientific method—were reasonable, surely the planet would be on that warming trend now. It’s not.

The most accurate and complete temperature survey of the planet comes from satellites, beginning in 1979. Over the past 44 years, satellite data reveals that the trend of global warming has been 0.13°C per decade, which if continued would add only 1°C by 2100.

Interestingly, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increased by 25% over those four decades. CO2 doesn’t seem to have caused much warming during that time.

The warmest year on the satellite record is 1998 (caused by an El Nino event) indicating no current warming trend for the last 24 years. And CO2 concentrations have since increased by 14%.

This satellite data is backed up by the world’s most sophisticated land-based temperature survey designed for scientific research. The United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) was set up to provide continental U.S. temperature data using state-of-the-art triple redundant instruments in pristine locations unaffected by human activity.

There has been no warming trend in the continental United States since USCRN data collection began 18 years ago. Interestingly again, CO2 concentrations were up 10% during that period.

Mr. Poilievre, this lack of warming is well-known and documented in the public domain. The limitations of CO2 causing global warming are also well-known and documented in the scientific domain and even accepted by the IPCC.

That is why Trudeau, with only tepid backing from the IPCC, is now claiming increased extreme weather events as the new basis for fear of climate change.

Except it’s not true that we’re experiencing increased extreme weather events. A recent study using established and accepted international databases saw no statistically significant increasing trends in the intensity of heatwaves, hurricanes and/or tropical storms, tornadoes, global and extreme precipitation, droughts, or floods.

On a Canadian note, the 2021/22 extreme weather events in central British Columbia consisting of a succession of a polar vortex, heat dome, wildfires, and flooding were not a result of CO2-induced climate change. They are all linked to instability in the jet stream, solidly backed up by meteorological science.

The Natural Causes of Climate Change Are Very Large.

The sun provides the Earth with almost all of its surface heat. On the time scale of recent human history, changes in the output of the sun are the smoking gun for climate change.

A less active sun has a weakened magnetic field, which allows more galactic cosmic rays to hit our atmosphere and ionize molecules. These ionized molecules become cloud-building sites. Low, dense clouds block the sun’s heat from reaching the surface of the Earth, causing temperatures to drop.

The opposite is true; a more active sun has a stronger magnetic field that shields the Earth from cosmic rays. This means less ionization and cloud-building, so more of the sun’s warming energy reaches the surface.

When the sun’s activity is low for many decades it is called a Grand Solar Minimum. During the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1850, we experienced four consecutive Grand Solar Minimums; at that time the average global temperature was about 1°C lower than today.

Conversely, sustained high solar activity is called a Grand Solar Maximum and the most recent occurrence was during much of the 20th century when we experienced about 1°C of global warming.

The IPCC, with Trudeau‘s adherence, dismiss solar changes even though a 1% reduction in cloud cover could explain the global warming of the past century.

Eliminating The Carbon Tax is a Great Idea.

As Dr. Lars Schernikau, Ph.D. in Energy Economics and who grew up in the centrally planned economy of East Germany points out “…because pricing one externality but not others leads to economic and environmental distortions… causing human suffering.”

His example is particularly applicable to Canada where CO2 pricing is only on combustion, but green technology is exempt:

“How else could a ‘Net-Zero’ label be assigned to a solar panel produced from coal and minerals extracted in Africa with diesel-run equipment, transported to China on a vessel powered by fuel oil, and processed with energy from coal- or gas-fired power using partially with forced labor?”

Technology Cannot Handle CO2 Emissions.

In fact, technology is rather bad at handling CO2 emissions. Let’s look at wind power first. A 15% drop in wind speed equates to a 40% drop in electrical generation. Europe is a prime example of the failure of wind power.

That failure transferred European energy security to Russia which enabled it to invade Ukraine. American solar power failures became the highlight of Michael Moore’s documentary Planet of the Humans.

Hydrogen fuel cells were aptly described by Elon Musk as “mind-bogglingly stupid.” Burning hydrogen directly is not only an extreme safety risk (leaks from plastic local distribution pipelines), but it produces six times the smog-causing nitrous oxides that natural gas does.

Many hydroelectric dams produce more greenhouse gases than the burning of coal due to the cement-related CO2 and methane emissions from the artificial lakes.

Fully electric vehicles are a bad idea for Canada because (a) in very cold weather their driving range is halved while the charging time is doubled and (b) we don’t have the grid capacity to charge them anyway.

Adding ethanol to gasoline does not reduce CO2 emissions. That’s just an accounting trick, but not much of a trick because ethanol emissions are simply not counted. However, it does drive up food prices significantly, as food is converted to fuel. This is devastating to the world’s poor.

Carbon capture and storage in Canada’s oil sector would divert large sums of money away from being available for health care and reducing taxes while providing no impact on the steadily increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration (which incidentally is also driving up global crop yields).

Capping CO2 emissions from Canada’s oil industry just means a dictator’s oil will fill the market gap we could have ethically and responsibly filled.

Canada’s Next Election.

A global fear of climate change has led to panic, panic has led to bad decisions, and bad decisions have led to failure. The result is energy poverty, hunger, massive distortions of the free market, and a shooting war in Europe. That’s a far cry from the United Nations’ mandate of promoting peace.

Trudeau’s game plan for climate change is more fear, more panic, and more failure. Meanwhile, not a single signatory to the 2015 Paris Agreement is on track to meet their 1.5°C emissions reductions target. Additionally, Canada now holds the title of the world’s most useful climate idiot and we have become a house divided.

A rational game plan would include only facts established by the scientific method, and dispassionate deliberation from the larger scientific and engineering community (wherein Canadians still enjoy a respected reputation).

Canadians should not fear climate change; they should understand it and prepare as necessary. We need a new plan based on evident realities, not science “experienced differently” by Trudeau.

What we should truly fear is Trudeau’s fight against climate change.

Best regards,

CO2 Coalition Member Ron Barmby (www.ronaldbarmby.ca) is a Professional Engineer with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree, whose 40+ year career in the energy sector has taken him to over 40 countries on five continents. His book, Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic’s Guide to Global Climate Hysteria (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), explains in layman’s terms the science of how natural and human-caused global warming work.

2024 Election Rigging In Plain Sight

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jay Valentine explains how those in power are setting up to stay in power next year in his American Thinker article How to Lose in 2024.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Industrial-scale fraud, committed by organized actors,
accelerates over time like a drug-resistant bacterium.

If you want to know how America is going to get screwed in 2024, follow the dough. That is the Zuckerberg dough. Zuck and pals are spending tens of millions of dollars, not padding voter rolls, not fighting lawsuits, not getting voters out early… they are spending the dough infiltrating and controlling election commissions.

For those who think cleaning the voter rolls and voting early are enough protect 2024, our data proves you are delusional. The Left is all in controlling election commissions. Expect Kari Lake’s outcome to move from an outlier to a standard outcome in 2024. Election commission fraud, which we coined as sovereign fraud two years ago, has attractive characteristics for the Left.

It always works — because it is invisible.

Election fraud tools are stuck in the 1970s — useless “phantom” and “dead people databases” are out of date a month after being published. Lawsuits make great headlines but achieve little because nobody is going to change an election outcome, no matter how egregious the conduct and powerful the evidence. A slate of Arizona candidates is the most recent victim.

The Zuckerberg boys will march into leftist-dominated cities – again, writing checks and controlling election machinery. They know who voted, who did not vote, who never votes (and vote them), how many votes are needed. Each of these actions has a common characteristic — it happens within 2-3 weeks during early voting!

Republicans and their obsolete voter integrity groups will focus madly on getting their vote in early. They will focus on challenging dead voters. All good things that will fail again.

The Zuckerbucks team has a grander focus.  Zuck’s guys know if those pesky phantoms are not off the rolls now, they won’t get taken off for 2024 — too many obstacles, not enough time!

The Zuckerbucks money is going to that election commission where there will be zero Republicans, no voter integrity teams, and tons of phantoms with no controlling legal authority.

That’s what they did in 2020 and 2022 and have in store for 2024.
Why change?

Here’s how they are going to do it! This isn’t speculation, we see it in the data for a dozen states. When mail-in ballots go out, an election commission will change the zip codes (again) for 30,000 voters who will not get their ballots — someone else will. Voter integrity teams and the Republicans will be totally blind to this — how can they know when those zip codes get changed back 10 days later — after the ballots are in flight?

Republicans are going to vote early. Who cares? In this one county,
leftists just banked a 30,000-vote cushion.

During early voting, our leftists will add 22,000 new voters (again). Why during early voting? Because the Republicans, using 1970s technology, never know it is being done. They have a four-month-old snapshot from the “data driven RNC.” Okay, this county just added 22,000 votes (again) to their buffer — just in case.

Perhaps this is not enough!  The leftists, ever diligent, send out a phone app (again) tying directly to the state’s voter system, allowing new voters to be added. They do most of it during the 30 days preceding the election.

Why? Because the Republicans have zero real-time visibility to voter rolls in states they control — and of course none in states they do not control — so this goes unseen and unreported until it’s time to vote.

This is not news! This happened at scale in 2020 and 2022 and we have the data
to prove it!  Every example above happened.
You may read about some of them a year after the election.

2024 is on the line and if Republicans do not wake up to leftists controlling election commissions — even in Republican states — 2024 will repeat 2020.

Republicans have ancient, well-funded voter integrity organizations with a proven process: raise tons of dough, do seminars, file some lawsuits, take some phantoms off voter rolls, lose elections to leftist fraud, litigate, lose again. They were snuffed in 2020 and 2022! They never saw it — election commission fraud perpetrated at industrial scale — because that isn’t what their donors want to hear. Stick to the early voting and chasing phantoms! This is the Republican process and perhaps we ought to take a step back and ask “WTF are we doing here?”

Why aren’t we waking up to the obvious right in front of our faces? Why are we accepting a presidential candidate and an RNC saying they will beat institutional voter commission criminal fraud by voting early and learning ballot harvesting?

Sometimes we watch a stupid thing happen in real time like a semi-tractor-trailer wreck on YouTube in slow motion and disbelieve how something so dangerous could happen! We read stories about a historical figure with destiny in hand — Napoleon in Russia — questioning how he missed the winter thing. Or Muslims taking flight lessons but skipping the landing part — and wondering why nobody said anything.

We are that guy now standing there knowing with 100% certainty that leftists in 2024 are going to steal the election by manipulating election commissions.  Zuckerberg publicly said where he is putting his dough!

We know it works because it is in the data from 2020 and 2022.  It is organized,
centralized criminal fraud perpetrated by election commissions of both parties!
It worked for the last two elections!

 

Official Censors Misinform on Covid, Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ross McKitrick writes at Financial Post Policing misinformation from the misinformation police.  Excerpt in italics with my bolds and added images.

State-sponsored ‘experts’ on ‘misinformation’ are typically the worst offenders

As citizens of a liberal democracy Canadians have long believed that only the free contest of differing points of view can produce genuine intellectual progress. But now we are told we face a crisis of “misinformation” that calls for vigorous censorship of heretical opinion. On all of today’s major public controversies, we are asked to believe, all of us would enthusiastically assent to the one obviously correct view (which happens to be the view promulgated by the governing class) were it not for the pernicious influence of a shadowy conspiracy of social-media traffickers in misinformation — voices that must be suppressed for the good of society.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill decisively rebutted this argument. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion,” he wrote, “is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.” It is one thing, Mill argues, if the holders of received opinion conclude their view is correct because, though challenged, it has not been refuted; but another thing altogether if it’s simply assumed true and challenge is therefore forbidden.

Yet that’s precisely the position of today’s would-be “misinformation” police.

In reality, state-sponsored “experts” on “misinformation” are typically the worst offenders. Presuming themselves infallible, they call for new laws to shut everyone else up.

In the climate domain, a group called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) boasts a Climate Disinformation Team consisting of five staff members, all trained in arts or political science (none in economics or physical sciences) who have put out a long report (and follow-up) supposedly documenting these networks of online misinformation and calling for new legislation and stricter rules for social media companies to combat it.

The reports feature screenshots of social media posts that critique
alarmist climate claims or the high costs of climate policy.

The ISD does not rebut but simply displays these posts — as if their mere existence is proof censorship is needed. For instance, they say “Calling into question the viability and effectiveness of renewable energy sources is a common practice among climate sceptics and delayist actors,” and then show a series of social media posts pointing out problems associated with wind and solar power systems. But wind and solar power systems do have problems, including intermittency and the need for costly fossil-fuel backups. To suggest otherwise is itself misinformation.

Closer to home, an organization called the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), which purports to draw on top experts in Canada to give guidance to policy-makers, recently issued a report on “science and health misinformation” that concludes society would benefit from more vigorous efforts to suppress debate and ban more people from social media.

Much of the report consists of finger-wagging against anyone
who questioned anti-COVID public health measures.

For instance: “(O)ngoing claims that mask wearing is ineffective or even harmful have shifted firmly into the realm of misinformation.” Meanwhile, back in science, a newly-published, peer-reviewed meta-analysis summarizing 10 randomized control trials involving nearly 277,000 people concludes that “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness (ILI)/COVID-19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.” So who’s spreading misinformation?

The CCA report also has much to say about supposed climate misinformation. But again none of the authors is an economist or climate scientist. The closest they come to an “expert” is a psychologist who has spent years studying, or more precisely denigrating, skeptical climate blogs and their contributors. In several places, the CCA report relies on his 2012 article asserting that climate skepticism is correlated with a wide set of dubious conspiracies, such as believing the moon landing was a hoax. But it fails to mention a 2015 statistical critique published in the same journal that showed its conclusions “are not supported by the data.”

CCA brags about its peer review process, saying reviewers were selected for their “diverse perspectives and areas of expertise.” But again the reviewers did not include climate scientists or economists; nor is there any evidence of diversity of perspectives. As a rule, one-sided and unimpressive polemicists constitute the CCA’s “expert team.”

And yet CCA complains (at length) about the public’s declining trust in scientific institutions.

To the extent the CCA report offers any factual assertions about climate change, it points to “catastrophic events” such as “droughts, floods, and wildfires exacerbated by climate change.” It fails to mention, however, that Chapter 11 of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says, concerning droughts, that “Global studies generally show no significant trends” and that in most places around the world there’s “inconclusive evidence” tying droughts to human-induced climate change. In North America in particular there’s “low confidence in the attribution of long-term changes in meteorological drought.”

Regarding floods, “In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.” As for wildfires, they have been trending down globally for the past decade. In Canada, according to the Canadian National Fire Database, both the number of forest fires and total area burned peaked in the late 1980s and has been declining ever since. Yet again the CCA offers misinformation to support its case for more censorship.

Here’s a better idea. Ignore the CCA and the ISD
and all the other would-be enforcers of orthodoxy.

Drop the fixation on “misinformation,” which is just the latest iteration of the same old desire of governments to censor their opponents. Allow the public the freedom, as Mill counselled, to hear arguments “from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.” A dangerous thought in 1859, and judging by the current misinformation craze, an utter heresy today; yet true nonetheless.

Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.

 

What About Affirmative Action? SCOTUS and Sowell

Posted on by Ron Clutz

There is much consternation and anticipation regarding cases before SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US) regarding racially biased admissions policies at universities, specifically Harvard and North Carolina.  Hearings were held last fall, and a ruling is expected in July, unless there is a leak beforehand as happened regarding the decision returning abortion policies to state voters.

For example, reports like this one reflect how this decision goes to the heart of identity politics and critical race theory. Supreme Court Affirmative Action Cases Could Bring End to Race-Conscious Admissions from Teen Vogue.  Excerpt:

A ruling that makes race-conscious admissions practices unconstitutional — or even that further narrows the weight that race can be given — doesn’t only have worrisome implications for universities; employer hiring practices and diversity in the workplace could dramatically shift if affirmative action in higher education is struck down. Given that landscape, lower courts could look at other precedents where the Court has found race to be a permissible factor under federal antidiscrimination statutes and decide they no longer apply. Doing so could potentially undermine employer recruitment and diversity initiatives and hinder the pipeline of diverse talent.

Bonus SAT points (plus and minus) awarded by university admissions staff based on racial identities.

The Court will issue its decision on these cases by July of this year. In a world where the Supreme Court grants SFFA the relief it seeks, applicants won’t be able to share the backgrounds and experiences they have that are directly connected to their racial identity. In a society where there are efforts to ban books that examine race relations, where instructors are threatened for using their classroom as a venue to discuss literature and ideas on race, a court-imposed ban on the consideration of race in admissions would be yet another blow to fostering diversity in schools.

It remains unclear what, if anything, will be salvageable from the Court’s ultimate ruling on affirmative action. But in this waiting period, some universities are thinking more intentionally about their role in and beyond this fight, and what holistic admissions programs should look like moving forward.

OTOH, others look forward to the demise of “temporary” affirmative action programs: After Affirmative Action from Real Clear Politics.  Excerpt:

Why is affirmative action in jeopardy? The main reason, ironically, might be the increasing ethnic diversity of the United States. In 1960, the U.S. was roughly 88% white and 12% black. The census category “Hispanic” did not yet exist. Similarly, the U.S. did not have a separate “Asian” category for the less than one million Americans from various nations in Asia, though the 1960 census had separate boxes for some, but not all, Asian countries. Today the U.S. is 61% white and dropping. Among American children, the white/nonwhite population is rapidly approaching 50-50.

But the interpretation of the law rapidly transformed from prohibiting categories of action to creating “protected classes” of people, to the point where it essentially pits white men – and now, with the introduction of sexual orientation as a protected class, specifically straight white men – against everyone else. Other than that shrinking group, all others are supposed to be “protected” from discrimination in our DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) regime.

If the Supreme Court cuts the Gordian Knot and rules affirmative action illegal under the Civil Rights Act, and/or declares that it is unconstitutional, what should be the next step? Even without affirmative action, our administrative bureaucracies, dedicated to the principle of equality of outcome, will work mightily to sustain the division between protected classes of people and others. They will, after the fashion of previous supporters of racialized schools, practice massive resistance. They, like their predecessors, need to be fought.

Enter Thomas Sowell’s Wisdom and Scholarship on this Issue

Excerpts on Affirmative Action from The Thomas Sowell Reader 

Assumptions Behind Affirmative Action

With affirmative action suddenly coming under political attack from many directions, and with even liberals backing away from it, we need to question not only its underlying assumptions but also what some of the alternatives are.

At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities
show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence
—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.

Nor are such disparities new or peculiar to the United States. In medieval Europe, most of the inhabitants of the towns in Poland and Hungary were neither Poles nor Hungarians. In nineteenth-century Bombay, most of the shipbuilders were Parsees, a minority in Bombay and less than one percent of the population of India.

In twentieth-century Australia most of the fishermen in the port of Freemantle came from two villages in Italy. In southern Brazil, whole industries were owned by people of German ancestry and such crops as tomatoes and tea have been grown predominantly by people of Japanese ancestry.

Page after page—if not book after book—could be filled with similar statistical disparities from around the world and down through history. Such disparities have been the rule, not the exception.

Yet our courts have turned reality upside down and treated what happens
all over this planet as an anomaly and what is seldom found
anywhere—proportional representation—as a norm.

Why are such disparities so common? Because all kinds of work require particular skills, particular experience, particular locations and particular orientations. And none of these things is randomly distributed.

Local demagogues who thunder against the fact that Koreans run so many stores in black ghettoes merely betray their ignorance when they act as if this were something strange or unusual. For most of the merchants in an area to be of a different race or ethnicity from their customers has been common for centuries in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji, the Ottoman Empire and numerous other places.

When German and Jewish merchants moved into Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, they brought with them much more experience in that occupation than that possessed by local Eastern European merchants, who were often wiped out by the new competition. Even when the competition takes place between people who are racially and ethnically identical, all kinds of historical, geographical and other circumstances can make one set of these people far more effective in some activities than the others.

Mountain people have often lagged behind those on the plains below, whether highland Scots versus lowland Scots or the Sinhalese in the highlands of Sri Lanka versus the Sinhalese on the plains. The Slavs living along the Adriatic coast in ports like Dubrovnik were for centuries far more advanced than Slavs living in the interior, just as coastal peoples have tended to be more advanced than peoples of the interior hinterlands in Africa or Asia.

Some disparities of course have their roots in discrimination. But the fatal mistake is to infer discrimination whenever the statistical disparities exceed what can be accounted for by random chance. Human beings are not random. They have very pronounced and complex cultural patterns.  These patterns are not unchanging. But changing them for the better requires first acknowledging that “human capital” is crucial to economic advancement.

Those who make careers out of attributing disparities to the wickedness of other people
are an obstacle to the development of more human capital among the poor.

There was a time, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan lagged far behind the Western industrial nations because it was lacking in the kind of human capital needed in a modern economy. Importing Western technology was not enough, for the Japanese lacked the knowledge and experience required to operate it effectively.

Japanese workmen damaged or ruined machinery when they tried to use it. Fabrics were also ruined when the Japanese tried to dye them without understanding chemistry. Whole factories were badly designed and had to be reconstructed at great cost.  What saved the Japanese was that they recognized their own backwardness—and worked for generations to overcome it.

They did not have cultural relativists to tell them that all cultures are equally valid
or political activists to tell them that their troubles were all somebody else’s fault.
Nor were there guilt-ridden outsiders offering them largess.

Affirmative action has been one of the great distractions from the real task of self-development. When it and the mindset that it represents passes from the scene, poorer minorities can become the biggest beneficiaries, if their attention and efforts turn toward improving themselves.

Unfortunately, a whole industry of civil rights activists, politicians and miscellaneous hustlers has every vested interest in promoting victimhood, resentment and paranoia instead.

Affirmative Action Around the World

While controversies rage over “affirmative action” policies in the United States, few Americans seem to notice the existence or relevance of similar policies in other countries around the world. Instead, the arguments pro and con both tend to invoke history and traditions that are distinctively American. Yet group preferences and quotas have existed in other countries with wholly different histories and traditions—and, in some countries, such policies have existed much longer than in the United States.  What can the experiences of these other countries tell us? Are there common patterns, common rationales, common results? Or is the American situation unique?

Ironically, a claim or assumption of national uniqueness is one of the most common patterns found in numerous countries where group preferences and quotas have existed under a variety of names. The special situation of the Maoris in New Zealand, based on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, is invoked as passionately in defense of preferential treatment there as the unique position of untouchables in India or of blacks in the United States.

Despite how widespread affirmative action programs have become, even the promoters of such programs have seldom been bold enough to proclaim preferences and quotas to be desirable on principle or as permanent features of society. On the contrary, considerable effort has been made to depict such policies as “temporary,” even when in fact these preferences turn out not only to persist but to grow.

Official affirmative action or group preference policies must be distinguished from whatever purely subjective preferences or prejudices may exist among individuals and groups. These subjective feelings may of course influence policies, but the primary focus here is on concrete government policies and their empirical consequences—not on their rationales, hopes, or promises, though these latter considerations will not be wholly ignored. Fundamentally, however, this is a study of what actually happens, rather than a philosophical exploration of issues that have been amply—if not more than amply—explored elsewhere.

The resurgence of group preferences in societies committed to the equality of individuals before the law has been accompanied by claims not only that these preferences would be temporary, but also that they would be limited, rather than pervasive. That is, these programs would supposedly be limited not only in time but also in scope, with equal treatment policies prevailing outside the limited domain where members of particular groups would be given special help.

Similar reasoning was applied in the United States to both employment and admissions to colleges and universities. Initially, it was proposed that there would be special “outreach” efforts to contact minority individuals with information and encouragement to apply for jobs or college admissions in places where they might not have felt welcome before, but with the proviso that they would not be given special preferences throughout the whole subsequent processes of acceptance and advancement.

Similar policies and results have also been achieved in less blatant ways. During the era of the Soviet Union, professors were pressured to give preferential grading to Central Asian students and what has been called “affirmative grading” has also occurred in the United States, in order to prevent excessive failure rates among minority students admitted under lower academic standards. In India, such practices have been referred to as “grace marks.” Similar results can be achieved indirectly by providing ethnic studies courses that give easy grades and attract disproportionately the members of one ethnic group. This too is not peculiar to the United States. There are Maori studies programs in New Zealand and special studies for Malays in Singapore.

In the job market as well, the belief that special concerns for particular groups
could be confined to an initial stage proved untenable in practice.

Initially, the term “affirmative action” arose in the United States from an executive order by President John F. Kennedy, who called for “affirmative action to ensure that the applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin.” In short, there were to be no preferences or quotas at all, just a special concern to make sure that those who had been discriminated against in the past would no longer be discriminated against in the future—and that concrete steps should be taken so that all and sundry would be made aware of this.

However, just as academic preferences initially limited in scope continued to expand,
so did the concept of affirmative action in the job market.

A later executive order by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 contained the fateful expressions “goals and timetables” and “representation.” In December 1971, yet another Nixon executive order specified that “goals and timetables” were meant to “increase materially the utilization of minorities and women,” with “under-utilization” being spelled out as “having fewer minorities or women in a particular job classification than would reasonably be expected by their availability.” Affirmative action was now a numerical concept, whether called “goals” or “quotas.”

This confident pronouncement, however, presupposed a degree of control which has proved illusory in country after country. Moreover, “when and where there is social and economic inequality” encompasses virtually the entire world and virtually the entire history of the human race. A “temporary” program to eliminate a centuries-old condition is almost a contradiction in terms.

Equality of opportunity might be achieved within some feasible span of time,
but that is wholly different from eliminating inequalities of results.

Even an approximate equality of “representation” of different groups in different occupations, institutions or income levels has been a very rare—or non-existent—phenomenon, except where such numerical results have been imposed artificially by quotas. As a massive scholarly study of ethnic groups around the world put it, when discussing “proportional representation” of ethnic groups, “few, if any societies have ever approximated this description.”

In short, the even representation of groups that is taken as a norm is difficult or impossible to find anywhere, while the uneven representation that is regarded as a special deviation to be corrected is pervasive across the most disparate societies. People differ—and have for centuries. It is hard to imagine how they could not differ, given the enormous range of differing historical, cultural, geographic, demographic and other factors shaping the particular skills, habits, and attitudes of different groups.

Any “temporary” policy whose duration is defined by the goal of achieving something that has never been achieved before, anywhere in the world, could more fittingly be characterized as eternal.

 

 

War on Gas Stoves Heating Up

Posted on by Ron Clutz

As explained  below, the move against gas stoves is just an opening into a larger war against methane because of its CO2 emissions.  Coal was bashed as a fuel already long ago, and now activists want to disqualify gas lest it serve as a bridge energy source with much lower CO2 emissions, delaying the desired upheaval.  The current assault on domestic appliances should be seen as the thin edge of a wedge to destroy natural gas supply, in parallel with actions against coal and oil.

February 27, 2023 Update

From E & E Wire: DOE rule may block 50% of current gas stove models

Half of gas stove models sold in the United States today won’t comply with a first-ever efficiency regulation on cooking appliances, according to a new analysis from the Department of Energy.

The projection, which DOE posted online two weeks after the rule’s release Jan. 31, aims to provide more clarification on the expected impact of a proposal earlier this month that is now receiving comments from the public (Energywire, Feb. 1).

DOE says the cooking regulation will preserve some market share for gas stoves that have at least one high-input rate burner and continuous cast iron grates, two features that DOE determined are priorities for the public. Both features use a lot of energy.

If enacted, the proposed rule would be the second major DOE regulation affecting stovetops — existing standards prohibit constant burning pilots for gas cooking products. DOE is moving forward with the rule along with other efficiency standards, including for distribution transformers, washing machines and refrigerators (Energywire, Feb. 16).

Background from Previous Post:  Gas Stoves Just a Starter

Mark Krebs and Tom Tanton explain the ins and outs of this new phase encroaching upon the citizenry where they live.  Their Master Resource article is Gas Stoves: The Beloved Blue Flame is Just Better.  Some excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images and headers.

The Larger Federal Goal:  Transition Away from Natural Gas

The concern should not be about gas stove usage but the public policy of The Biden Administrative State to wean consumers off the direct use of natural gas and propane and on to electric appliances, ASAP. This “transition” includes how to heat your home, heat your water, cook, and drive.

Gas cooking is highly valued by consumers, virtually all of whom have normal taste buds. It is the one gas appliance that consumers see and use daily. The blue flame is part of home life, as is the fireplace run by gas or propane.

In contrast, the furnace and water heater usually tucked away in the basement or equipment closet and operate unseen. Also unseen are the legions of new electric power plants transmission lines and battery storage system to provide ostensibly “clean” juice for these new electric appliances and the serious environmental, strategic, and human rights impacts from mining and processing heavy metals and rare earths.

In fact, no one has done a comparative full fuel cycle analysis to document whether electrification is a good idea or a bad one; at least not a transparent analysis that has been subject to independent technical debate. Neither have the all-electrification busybodies presented a comprehensive plan to produce the millions of batteries necessary for the electrical grid to be able to handle all these new uses, while burdened by intermittent wind and solar.

Govt. Misdirection:  Claims Gas Stoves Hazardous to Indoor Air Quality

The first ploy was to claim gas stoves are unsafe concerning air pollutants.  Several problems with this attempt to regulate away these cooking appliances.

Fear mongering about the “existential threat” from Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hasn’t been working as well as planned. So maybe, they hope, additional fearmongering about how parents are putting their own children at risk due to respiratory ailments, such as asthma from your stove will do the trick.

There are at least three agencies leading the Biden Administration’s whole-of-government fossil-fuel eradication efforts. These are:

  • DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy” (EERE)
  • The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)
  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

None of these agencies have Congressional authority to regulate “indoor air pollution.” EERE has been pushing electrification at least since the Obama Administration, and it continued even throughout the Trump Administration. The Biden Administration simply removed the nominal (if any) restraints there may have been under Biden’s “whole of government” executive orders (EOs) to reduce GHG’s: e.g., Executive Order (EO) 13990.

In EERE’s case certain EO obstacles include that they still must act “as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.” The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA) is one such law. EPCA is also supposed to promote regulatory objectivity. Under EPCA, DOE/EERE must also “consider” safety.

The science that the Biden Administration claims to guide such regulatory decisions
is far from conclusive that gas stoves are harmful.

Instead, the Biden Administration and its supporters “cherry pick” data that supports regulatory expansion. In this case, the science comes from the highly partisan Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). A major activity (and bias) of RMI is its “Electricity Innovation Lab. It reiterates RMI’s mission to achieve a carbon-free electricity monopoly.

According to independent scientific researchers with a deep knowledge of this subject, most of the “indoor air pollution” is emitted from the food itself being cooked. Such pollution is in the form of particulates from cooking food regardless of what form of energy is doing the cooking. Those particulates may be especially harmful to adolescent asthmatics.

More Govt. Hype: Replacements More Efficient than Gas Stoves

Government Orange Gas?

What is it exactly that DOE wants to force on consumers under the guise of “energy efficiency in the case of gas stoves? It appears to be a relatively new type of gas stove burner that glows orange (infrared, a.k.a., “radiant”) instead of the blue flames present in traditional burners that consumers are accustomed to. Infrared burners have been around for a long time, especially for gas BBQ grills but they don’t last long. Infrared burner adoption for consumer kitchen cooking appliances have been limited to a few high-end “prosumer” gas ranges. Costs for such models tend to be in the vicinity of $7,000 to $9,000. One example is Wolf/Sub Zero’s Model # GR364G with a MSRP of $8,760. And only the griddle portion of that model is infrared. According to DOE, there may be one model that is all infrared but good luck finding it.

In comparison, a basic electric range can be purchased for under $500. Granted, if DOE mandates infrared gas burners, mass production could decrease cost premiums. But for cost-conscious consumers, such premiums will likely far exceed those of electric stoves, even induction electric stoves.

Forcibly moving the market via equipment costs is a typical DOE strategy.
And then they say, “let the market decide.

Part of DOE’s bag of tricks for justifying higher gas appliance efficiencies is to minimize maintenance costs and safety concerns.  At a minimum, “worst-case scenario” analyses are needed to determine how infrared burners perform in the “real world” of “messy” stoves. In messy situations, infrared burners may turn into product liabilities. And they may have to be replaced; that can quickly get expensive. It is at least possible that “dirty” infrared burners emit more pollutants than traditional blue flame burners. DOE needs to “consider” safety consequences of its energy efficiency proposals going forward.  It is not evident that they have.

Likewise, DOE tends to minimize its estimations for what the increased prices will be that consumers must bear from increased efficiency.  Taken together with other forms of analytical “trickery,” consumer cost-effectiveness can quickly become negative.

Since pictures are “worth a thousand words, see Shutterstock’s 223 images of infrared gas stoves. Several of these are pictures of infrared burners that have experienced obvious degradation from cooking spills.

There’s also movement on the electrical stove side of all this. That is, electric stoves continue to change and the technology du jour is the induction stove. Induction stoves electro-magnetically couple the stove with the pan, directly heating the pan and not the stove. They are more efficient than tradition hot coil electric resistance stoves but are also more expensive and require magnetic cookware. They too, have associated health risks (Induction stoves may not be safe to use with pacemakers; “People with pacemakers are better off avoiding induction stoves.”)

Perverse Incentives in Inflation reduction Act

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act provides perverse incentives for switching to electricity.  These incentives are summarized as follows:

DOE also needs to consider the safety feature of having a gas stove during extended electric grid blackouts that may make the difference between consumers and their water pipes freezing or not.  This benefit was widely observed in Texas during Winter Storm Uri.

To make a logical scientific argument about consumer safety concerns with gas burners, DOE must clearly and transparently demonstrate a safety issue with conventional “blue flame” burners.  Instead, DOE is proposing a one-way move to infrared burners based upon theoretical economic operating cost advantages of a few percentage points.

Meanwhile, DOE is not mandating a move from electric resistance stoves to higher efficiency  electric induction  stoves that, according to the EPA,  can be “5-10% more efficient than conventional electric resistance units.”  EPA’s verbiage following that quote states: “and about 3 times more efficient than gas.”  That latter verbiage is tantamount to professing a belief that electricity is magically created inside of the house’s electric meter. This is pretty much “par for the course” for the Biden Administration’s “Green New Deal” energy and environmental policies.

Under EPCA’s anti-backsliding provisions, once infrared burners are mandated, there is no going back to traditional (blue flame) gas burners. Thus, if consumers want to regain better cooking maintenance and reliability, they can only switch to electric stoves. We think that’s their plan! Consumers will probably choose electric resistance varieties due to their relatively low initial purchase cost. What this portends, at least for the next few decades, is that energy efficiency when measured over the complete fuel-cycle is massively reduced throughout most of the United States where fossil fuels still dominate electric grid generation. The same goes for emissions when measured along the complete fuel-cycle.

The direct use of natural gas makes the most sense economically and environmentally for consumers. Consumers are losing that choice.

Conclusion–Why The Crusade?

Why is the Biden Administration messing with a piece of Americana. Is it to try the hardest part first? Or because “clean” electrification is where the money is? With passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, it is definitely where the subsidies are. The enormity of these subsidies are like an all-you-can-eat buffet for Green New Deal enrichment.

Phasing out natural gas and propane is not merely for the U.S. to meet its commitments for “deep decarbonization” per the UN’s Paris accords. It’s also about “great reset” social control. With the advent of “smart” electric meters and appliances, it’s relatively easy to centrally control electricity usage.

Coupled with digital currency, it then becomes relatively easy to control behavior, such as remotely changing YOUR living room thermostat or disabling your car. Early dinner? No: you’ll cook when the power is temporarily turned on to your stove.  But if you project the correct attitude of cheerful compliance, you may be awarded with an extra ration of electricity.

DOE needs to stop politicizing energy appliances on unfounded predictions that “clean” renewable electricity will soon dominate the grid. This scenario is not at all probable given the cost and enormity of the quest. Big Brother is already running wild and must be leashed/removed. Given that DOE’s proposed rule calls for yearly energy consumption limits for cooking appliances, rationing might not be totally far-fetched. The time to expose and eradicate is now.

Appendices to Master Resource Article

Appendix A: Call To Action (Next Steps, What You Can Do)

Appendix B: Further Reading

Footnote

Obviously, bans against ICE vehicles will also prohibit those running on LNG (Liquified Natural Gas). See Consumers Report: Tesla Road Trip

As for fertilizer banning,  half of the people on Earth are alive today thanks to nitrogenous fertilizers made of and with natural gas.  So why are governments at home and abroad scrambling to cut off humanity’s natural gas supply?

See Natural Gas – Generated Nitrogenous Fertilizers Prevent Worse World Hunger