Great Russians Explain Ukraine Invasion as Need to Make them Little Russians

The following statement occurred in several Russian state media as justification for the Invasion of Ukraine:

Russia is restoring its unity – the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome. Yes, at a great cost, yes, through the tragic events of a virtual civil war, because now brothers, separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies, are still shooting at each other, but there will be no more Ukraine as anti-Russia. Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together – in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, then we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors, but would also be cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.

So Russia believes it is justified in using force to unite its superior Great Russians with the inferior Little Russians.  Did it never occur to those idiot Great Russians that the Ukrainians might not find the idea of being their subservient Little Russians a very appealing idea?  Those Little Russians sure are looking stout in their courageous rejection of Great Russian enslavement as their serfs.  They are acting like Ukrainians, not Little Russians.

I Condemn Russia and Red China as an Axis of Evil

The Russian Federation, signatory with the USA and the United Kingdom of a guarantee of independent Ukraine's borders in 1994, has invaded Ukraine.  These guarantees were a critical reason Ukraine gave up the world's third largest number of nuclear weapons on its soil after the dissolution of the USSR.  Yes, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so NATO is not obligated by treaty to defend Ukraine, but the USA and the United Kingdom are obligated by their 1994 treaty.  Both are defaulting on that obligation now as they did in 2014 when Russia took the Crimea.  To be sure, the treaty was perhaps an ill-considered one by the Clinton administration, but that administration was also very concerned, with justification, about the many nuclear weapons then in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as a result of the dissolution of the USSR.  To uphold our treaty, we would have had to provide more military aid and training to Ukraine, which might have stimulated Russia to an earlier invasion.  This was a very knotty problem.

Putin claims that Ukrainians are Russians or at least their close brothers.  He says that historically, Ukraine was part of Russia.  He claims they are both Orthodox by religion and share a language.  This being the case, Ukraine must be re-united with the Russians.

Actually, the Kievan Rus was a separate country with its own court, language, large capital city Kiev, now Kyiv, and distinct farming economy when the Duchy of Muscovy was a small fur-trading town.  The Kievan Rus was the largest country in Europe.  It had extensive interactions with the French court and its court was one of the most advanced in Europe for a couple hundred years (1000 - 1200 AD approximately), which was a status Moscow never achieved.  Present day Ukraine consists of an eastern part that Russia conquered and was largely brought under Russian control by Catherine the Great.  The eastern Ukraine generally became Orthodox in religion and the Russians worked hard to force the Ukrainians to speak Russian.  The western part of Ukraine was united with Lithuania and Poland in various combinations for hundreds of years, then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the late 1700s until after WW1, when it became part of Poland.  The western Ukraine is largely Catholic.  There is also a large Jewish population in Ukraine, including the present President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Putin claims is a Nazi.

How have the Russians treated their Ukrainian brothers?  In Czarist times, the authoritarian Czars were constantly suppressing the more freedom-loving Ukrainians.  They discriminated against them for government posts, for education, and tended to call them denigrating names, such as Little Russians.  Then eastern Ukraine, which had briefly won independence when the Czarist government fell in 1917, was brought under brutal Russian Communist control in stages in the early 1920s.  When the Russian Communists implemented the collective farm programs and stole the farmland of the Kulaks, the richer farmers, Ukraine was hit harder than the rest of the USSR.  By about 1900, Ukraine had become known as the Breadbasket of Europe.  Many of its farmers were comparatively well off.  These hardworking people had their land stolen and the professional class of people in the many well-developed cities of Ukraine also lost their property.  Then in 1932 - 1933, the Russians took all the food the Ukrainians had grown and left millions of them to starve.  Once again, Ukrainians were discriminated against for government jobs and all jobs in the USSR were government jobs.  They were also discriminated against in education.  They were thought of by Russians as though they were hillbillies, the actual word a Russian Jewish scientist told me they were.

Putin was a KGB agent and a member of the Russian Mafia.  He climbed to power over the bodies of many Russians, let alone many Ukrainians.  Neither he nor the general Russian are someone any rational Ukrainian would want as a brother.  A brother does not steal the land of his brothers, yet Russians did this to Ukrainians.  A brother does not use brutal force to steal all the food grown by another brother and leave him to starve.  A brother does not prevent another brother from having a good job or a good education.  All around, the Putin claim that Ukrainians are Russian brothers is absurd.  He has managed to heighten that absurdity with his claim upon experiencing considerable Ukrainian resistance to his occupation of Ukraine by stating that he needed to set his nuclear forces at a high level of readiness because he cannot image in world without Russia.  Does he really think that Ukrainian resistance to invasion is a threat to the existence of Russia?  Well, perhaps it is a threat to his rule of Russia and he is a much a megalomaniac as Hitler, who could see no use in the continuation of the Third Reich without himself at its head.  Putin, as is the case with many long term dictators, has become mentally unstable and quite divorced from reality.

Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe, if you count Russia as a European country.  It is larger or about the size of France, and larger than Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Finland.  Kyiv, pronounced Kay-eve, contrary to what you hear on the news, is Europe's seventh largest city.  It is not an Appalachian hollow hamlet.  Lviv, of the western Ukraine and very near Poland, is known as the Cultural Center of Ukraine.  

Lviv is about 60 miles west of the small town from which my wife's family came.  Her older brother and sister were born in that town.  Her father, John Palka, was the village mayor and owned a wealthy enough farm of less than 40 acres, that he was a Kulak.  He also had a history of fighting the Communists, when as a 16 year-old he fought in the Ukrainian Army trying to resist the Communist takeover of Ukraine in the early 1920s.  When the Soviets took over the western Ukraine at the start of WWII upon the heinous partition of Poland between Germany and the USSR, he had to flee his home.  When the Germans attacked the USSR and soon took the western Ukraine, he returned and resumed his duties as mayor.  When the Soviets again returned in the closing period of WWII, Anna's family fled Ukraine and wound up in West Germany in the American sector at the end of the war.  They emigrated to the USA in late 1947 and arrived when Anna, my wife, was about 8 months old.  They settled in Cleveland, Ohio and became part of the large Ukrainian community of Cleveland.  The Palka family was active in the Ukrainian Catholic Church and Ukrainian Scouts.  Anna proudly became a U.S. citizen when she was a student at Case Western Reserve University.

I met Anna when I set up a dinner group to meet at the CWRU Hospital cafeteria of people interested in the works and philosophy of Ayn Rand.  I was working on my Ph.D. in Physics at Case Western Reserve University and Anna was working as a microbiologist at the Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital of CWRU.  We married in December 1973 and I became an adjunct member of her Ukrainian family, though with my deficient skills in learning languages, I never learned to speak Ukrainian.  This and my lack of dancing skills required some tolerance on their part.  Still worse, was my lack of belief in God and Catholicism.  Nonetheless, these good people were quite welcoming.

Some will dismiss my moral and  strategic analysis of the role of the Russian Federation as overly influenced by family bias now, but my family experience is also rich in the lessons of history, about which too few Americans have knowledge. 

The United States have contributed to Putin's ability to invade Ukraine by restraining its own oil, gas, and coal production since the start of the Biden administration.  This has caused the cost of oil and natural gas to rise and 40% of the Russian economy is due to its energy resources.  This was crucial to Russia since its total GDP is smaller than that of either Italy, Canada, or South Korea and barely larger than that of Brazil or Australia.  This is a direct result of the lack of freedom, property rights, and individual initiative in Russia.  Not only have we removed American oil, gas, and coal from the global economy, but we have taken to actually importing Russian oil!  We have been providing Russia with the money to pay its military, provide it with arms, and to assemble for the attack on Ukraine.  We aided Putin in building up a $600 billion war-chest so he can weather the relatively weak economic sanctions being applied to Russia.  We have crippled our own energy production at the urging of radical environmentalists who have received considerable Russian funding to achieve that purpose.  Both Russia and China have long promoted false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming in America to scare us into destroying our own great energy advantages to our economy and to global strategic policy.

Putin and the execrable Xi of Red China have entered into some sort of mutually supportive pact to aid their aggressions against their neighbors and to diminish the effects of any economic sanctions by moral indignant countries.  Just as Putin can cause many European nations great harm by cutting off the supply of natural gas and oil to them through a web of pipelines, so can Red China cause tremendous economic harm now that it was cornered so much of the world's manufacturing capacity.  With its cheap and often slave labor, its lack of concern for the environment, its currency manipulations, and its extensive use of coal-fired power plants, China has managed to become the world's largest manufacturer.  In 2018, the value of its manufacturing output was one and two-thirds that of the USA.  China is the dominant supplier of solar panels, rare earth metals for powerful magnets used in wind generators and other electric motors, chemicals for pharmaceutical production and for the Mexican drug cartels, and LEDs.  They are a huge beneficiary of the wrongheaded goal to establish solar and wind generation as the primary sources of electricity in the developed countries.  China's biggest trade partner is the European Union, closely followed by the USA.  The West is assiduously investing gigantic sums of capital in building manufacturing operations in China.  We are truly providing this evil country the rope to hang us with, just as the early Communists assured one another that the Capitalists would do.

Red China is a totalitarian country whose people outside of the annexed and suppressed Hong Kong have never known freedom.  People who have never or only long ago enjoyed freedom are not a moral people.  Morality only thrives among a free people.  Our Founders were fond of saying that a people could be and remain free only if they behaved morally.  The inverse is also true.  A nation which has long lacked freedom, lacks morality.  This applies to Russia as well as to Red China.

Biden has stated that Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO because corruption was widespread in Ukraine.  Rather than encouraging Ukraine to become less corrupt, the Biden family business actively took part in the corruption in Ukraine.  The Biden family business has also been extremely active in business operations in Red China which are controlled by the intelligence and military agencies of the Chinese Communist Party, including acquiring US company defense intellectual property.  It is not a wonder at all that Biden has worked hard to disassemble the American carbon-based fuel industries.  It is not a wonder that the Biden administration has proven such a weak ally to Ukraine.

Americans should become much more reluctant to purchase goods made in China.  They should encourage our government to allow the US carbon-based industries to greatly increase their production of these plenteous and reliable energy sources.  Americans should strongly condemn the ubiquitous violations of individual rights in the Russian Federation and in Red China.

The U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution to "deplore" the Russian invasion of Ukraine was approved by the USA, France, Britain, Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, and Norway.  China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained on the vote, which the Russian Federation vetoed.  We should remember the immoral choices that China, India, and the United Arab Emirates made on this resolution.

Bringing Britain's Energy Woes to America?

Bringing Britain’s woes to America?
 
Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
 
Paul Driessen
 
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
 
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards ... and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
 
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
 
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
 
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
 
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
 
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
 
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
 
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
 
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
 
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
 
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
 
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
 
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
 
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
 
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
 
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
 
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
 
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
 
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
 
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
 
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
 
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
 
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

Charles' Comment:  There seems to be no end to the destruction of lives and society that radical environmentalists and the believers in the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis work with so much dedication to accomplish!

Judicial Watch Defends Election Integrity by Insisting Voter Registration Rolls Be Accurate

Judicial Watch is a non-profit organization that works hard for government transparency, the rule of law, and the legitimacy of elections.  It is pursuing its on-going effort to get county and state governments to clean up their voter registration rolls as they are required to do by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).  The following paragraphs are from an email they just sent to me.  If this is an important issue to you, it is well worth reading.  If you think it is not an important issue, you will likely change your mind, if you are rational, when you read this:

The numbers of potentially ineligible voters identified in the new Judicial Watch probe are staggering. The NVRA requires states to remove registrations of voters who fail to respond to an address confirmation request and then fail to vote in two consecutive elections. States are required by federal law to report to Congress how many ineligible voters are removed from their rolls for this reason. Judicial Watch mined the statutory reporting data for some astonishing revelations: over the most recent four-year reporting period, large counties in powerful states such as New York and California reported few or no removals of ineligible voters from voting rolls.

For example, in the heart of New York City, Manhattan, with 1.2 million registered voters, state authorities removed a grand total of two ineligible voters from voting rolls for failing to respond to a notice and vote, according to data New York itself provided to Congress.

In Brooklyn, with 1.7 million registered voters, the number removed for this reason: zero. In Queens, with 1.3 million registered voters, the number removed as ineligible: zero. In the Bronx, with 867,000 voters: one ineligible voter was removed. In Staten Island, with 344,000 voters: zero.

The story is the same in California. Large counties show impossibly small number of ineligible voters removed from voting rolls for failing to respond to a notice and vote. In San Bernardino County in Greater Los Angeles, with a county population of 1.2 million registered voters, a total of fourteen ineligible voters were removed from the voting rolls for the entire four-year reporting period, according to data the state provided to federal officials. For Sacramento County, with over one million registered voters: zero removed. In Fresno County, with more than 500,000 registered voters: two ineligible voters removed.

“About 10% of Americans move every year,” notes Robert Popper, Judicial Watch’s director of voting integrity efforts. “Those counties should generate hundreds of thousands of cancelled registrations. There is simply no way to comply with federal law while removing so few outdated registrations under its key provision.”

Judicial Watch sent warning letters to state election officials in five states—New York, California, Oregon, Arkansas, and Illinois—noting the impossibly low numbers of statutory removals. The warning letters give the state 90 days to correct the record. “If the data are incorrect,” the Judicial Watch letters note, “please provide what you believe to be the correct numbers.” If the numbers are not corrected or otherwise resolved within 90 days, “we will commence a federal lawsuit.” Read the letters here.

Judicial Watch supporters know that this is not our first rodeo.

In California, we uncovered 1.6 million inactive voters on electoral rolls in Los Angeles County and sued, forcing LA to clean up its act.

We sued Pennsylvania for failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls. Pennsylvania revised its numbers, admitting it had reported incorrect information to a federal agency on the removal of ineligible voters. But even the new figures are too low. Pennsylvania now admits that in eighteen other counties—which together contain twenty-five percent of the entire state’s registered voters—it removed a grand total of fifteen inactive, ineligible voters in a two-year period.

We went to court in Colorado, where studies have shown that a majority of the state’s counties have registration rates that exceed 100% of the voting-age population. Our lawsuit charges “an ongoing, systemic problem with Colorado’s voter list maintenance obligations.”

We filed a lawsuit in North Carolina for the same reason—large numbers of ineligible voters on the state voter rolls.

We’ve successfully taken on Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana as well. In Ohio, a Supreme Court decision upheld a voter-roll cleanup stemming from a Judicial Watch lawsuit. In Kentucky, we sued for a voter-roll cleanup and won. Indiana agreed to clean up its rolls after Judicial Watch launched an investigation.

I hope you can also see that Judicial Watch is an organization worthy of the financial support of those of us for whom individual rights are of paramount importance.

Remote Learning By Ethnic Classification

The New York Times reports that: 

In March, half of Black and Hispanic children, and two-thirds of Asian-American children, were enrolled in remote school, compared with 20 percent of white students, according to the latest federal data.

There are numerous factors behind this.  Among them are: 

• The Black and Hispanic populations are often large in major cities and such cities due to Democrat Party control and high density populations have been more likely to have schools closed or to require greater social distancing.  The increased social distancing necessitates having fewer students in school classrooms.
• Black, Hispanic, and Asian American parents appear to be more fearful of the Covid-19 disease.  They do have higher morbidity rates.
• Black and Hispanic households tend to have lower incomes than white families do.  This encourages their older children to take on jobs to help their families out, since they are out of school anyway.  In other cases, the older children are impressed into babysitting duties for younger children as the parent(s) work.
• Black and Hispanic parents are more likely to have lost jobs or to have down-graded jobs due to business closures and reduced business operating hours during the pandemic.  This has put more pressure on older children to take on jobs to help support their families.
• When older children take on jobs to help support their families, it is harder to get them to graduate from high school.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children have high-grade computer capabilities at home for remote learning purposes.  Their parents are less likely to be able to help them with computer issues.
• A child on remote learning has greater needs for parental educational support.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children are in private schools.  A higher percentage are in government-run schools, which are run by a coalition of Democrat Socialist politicians and the socialist teachers unions.  Such government schools are more likely to be shutdown or operating in very reduced modes, thanks to fear of Covid-19.

Most American children have suffered horribly in their educations as a result of an inadequate primarily government-run education system in the first place.  The Covid-19 pandemic and the over-reaction to it has caused massive further harm to our children across the board.  We already had an education system in which our so-called Black and Hispanic children were operating at lower skill levels than our so-called White and Asian children.  The pandemic-induced harm has further exacerbated the differential lag of our Black and Hispanic children.

A substantial portion of the pandemic harm was the result of bad political and bad educational choices.  Fewer bad choices would have been made had the media, academia, and government health organizations encouraged, rather than discouraged, an honest and scientific discussion of Covid-19.  The suppression of that discussion suppressed the formation of non-vaccine weapons against the disease.  It fostered a suspicion among many that the Covid-19 government policies were often based on lies and cared little for their welfare.  Realizing this was the case, many developed unreasonable fears that their children were in much greater danger from Covid-19 than they were being told they were.  Even Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor believed that 100,000 American children had been made seriously ill by the disease.  What can we expect that many Black and Hispanic parents believed about the danger to their children?

Some of the short-comings of our mostly government-run school education system have been bared by the Covid-19 pandemic.  More Americans will address those short-comings by opting for more school choice, with tax money following children into private schools.  There has been an increase in home-schooling and that will remain a more popular option than it had been prior to the pandemic.  We have also been exposed to the naked lust for teacher union power pushing for excessive school closings, mask mandates, and excess distancing requirements.  We have seen how feckless Democrat politicians have been in counteracting the teachers unions excessive power, because those same Democrats are highly dependent upon teacher union support for their election to office.

I will write in the future about government employee unions and why they should be outlawed.  Until they are outlawed, they should at least not be allowed to participate in elections for political offices.

Does Nitrogen Dioxide Cause Asthma in Children?

The Hill -- Equilibrium/Stability, an environmental report put out by The Hill, makes the following claims:

The burden of pollution falls particularly hard on children, according to another Lancet study, which found that the pollutant nitrogen dioxide, or NO2 — a common byproduct of burning fossil fuels in cars and power plants ­­– has led to almost 2 million additional cases of childhood asthma.

The link in the quote is to the Medical press and an article by George Washington University which claims after a picture of smokestacks billowing what appears to be horrible pollutants, but may well be nothing but water vapor, especially given the lighting conditions:

Nearly 2 million new cases of pediatric asthma every year may be caused by a traffic-related air pollutant, a problem particularly important in big cities around the world, according to a new study published today. The study is the first to estimate the burden of pediatric asthma cases caused by this pollutant in more than 13,000 cities from Los Angeles to Mumbai.

"Our study found that nitrogen dioxide puts children at risk of developing asthma and the problem is especially acute in urban areas," Susan Anenberg, a co-lead author of the article and a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University, said. "The findings suggest that clean air must be a critical part of strategies aimed at keeping children healthy."

Examining the link in this last quote, we go to the paper in The Lancet entitled Long-term trends in urban NO2 concentrations and associated paediatric asthma incidence: estimates from global datasets.  What do we find here?

NO₂ itself has been associated with adverse health outcomes including asthma exacerbation.  Epidemiological studies have also found associations between transportation-related air pollutants and new onset asthma in children.  Toxicological and gene environment research indicates that transportation-related air pollutants cause airway inflammation and remodelling due to oxidative stress, resulting in asthma development in some individuals.  Epidemiological studies are generally consistent in their finding that NO₂ is significantly associated with paediatric asthma incidence, whereas the evidence for other transportation-related air pollutants (eg, PM_2·5) is more mixed.  Although the putative agent causing asthma in the traffic-related air pollution mixture is unknown, NO₂ could serve as a surrogate for other pollutants causing observed health effects.

I added the bold in each of the above quotes to emphasize the slippery impression that nitrogen dioxide is a cause of childhood asthma.  The first article in The Hill -- Equilibrium/Stability implies that it is a cause of childhood asthma.  The second article says it may be a cause in one paragraph and then says it puts children at risk of developing asthma, which means that it is a cause of asthma.  The Lancet paper implies that NO2 is somehow "associated" with asthma exacerbation, but then says that the agent causing asthma in traffic-related air pollution is unknown.  Nonetheless, the gist of the paper is that NO2 causes 2 million additional cases of childhood asthma.

The CDC still says that the cause of childhood asthma is unknown. It says:

While we don’t know what causes asthma, we do know how to prevent asthma attacks or at least make them less severe.

The bottom line is that we do not know that NO2 is causing asthma.  But, the radical environmentalists and the proponents of the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis very much want to create the impression that this product of carbon-based fuel combustion is poisoning children.  The game is a parallel to the darkening of water vapor emissions from smokestacks to make them look like evil pollutants.  It is like the construction of a case against coal-fired power plants based on their mercury emissions that I blew out of the water years ago on this blog.

There are far too many people politicizing science and, in the process, falsifying science.

On Mercury from coal-fired power plants, see:

Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants

The EPA's Newest Environmental Vendetta Against Coal

Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury

Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back by Walter Donway

This is the 5-Star Review I have just posted on amazon.com: 

A wonderful story of ideas, courage, reason, love, action, and commitment to reform an irrational university

Ideas have consequences.  They have life and death consequences for billions of individuals living their daily lives and pursuing their individual values.  Good ideas are not easy to identify. Very bad ideas are all too often passionately adopted by intelligent people.  Discovering good ideas and rejecting bad ideas demands a commitment to reason, knowledge of mankind’s history, and the willingness to debate those ideas with others.  We rely heavily on the education of young people to provide them with the knowledge that they may engage ideas to improve their lives, the lives of their family members, and the lives of their neighbors.  Education in America has lost its way and betrayed its mission.  This is especially true of our colleges and universities.  

Walter Donway’s new novel Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back takes on this most crucial issue in our civilization.  He tells a thrilling story of how a thoroughly postmodern, neo-Marxist, group-identity-centric university might be set back onto its proper education mission.  The story is one of ideas, melded with romance, and acts of courage in the face of intimidation and actual violence.  Men of reason have to confront the howling, brutal mobs that too many students and faculty have joined.

The university is an elite, historic university modeled upon Brown University, from which I graduated in 1969 and from which the author graduated in 1966.  It was in the late 1960s when many elite and many not so elite universities started to seriously take a path away from teaching the intellectual values of the Enlightenment and the history of Western Civilization, or any comprehensive and contextual history at all.  This was certainly true of Brown.  Brown has continued down this path, taking an evermore collectivist, group identity, and anti-individualist direction.

Damian, a graduate of the university returns from service in the Navy to see his father, a dean of the university. His father is alone in the university administration still committed to trying to admit the brightest and best prepared students without regard for group identities.  He is also committed to teaching the values of the Enlightenment and the history and values of Western Civilization.  He has a few, a very few, allies on the faculty.  There is a philosophy professor and a physicist on the faculty who are allies.  The physicist shares my evaluation that catastrophic man-made global warming is a failed hypothesis, so his life is threatened.  Asian and Jewish students must have several hundred points higher scores on their SATs compared to other identity groups to even have a chance of admission.  Courses have to be simplified and made subjective, rather than objective, so that intellectually less capable identity group students can pass the courses.  There is a huge administrative bureaucracy dedicated to diversity.  But worst of all, there are faculty and student groups determined that the only ideas that can be held or discussed on the campus are those of postmodernism, neo-Marxism, collectivism, group identity with oppressor/oppressed tags, anti-carbon fuel, and anti-free market ideas.

A speaker brought to the campus by the philosophy professor to give a talk opposed to these ideas is met with extreme violence.  The dean is also threatened with violence.  Fortunately, Damian has invited a SEAL friend to spend his leave with him.  His SEAL friend is able to help Damian deal with some of the violence on campus and near it.  This is a novel of action as well as one of ideas and their consequences.  It is directed primarily at thinking people, but it is not at all necessary to be an intellectual to enjoy this novel.  The characters are well-developed and just interesting people.  The main characters are people with whom you should enjoy spending some time!

Damian is an admirer of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, as am I.  There are very brief discussions of her philosophy with Damian’s philosophy professor mentor and with his lively and beautiful girlfriend. She is a very intelligent student thoroughly committed to socialism who grew up in Israel.  Atlas Shrugged has a transformative effect upon her as she reads it to better understand Damian.  It has such an effect upon many young people who want a rational and integrated philosophy of life.  Of course, Objectivism, like all ideas, should be subject to vigorous discussion and evaluation on our college campuses.  It is Damian’s dream to become a college philosophy faculty member to assure this happens.  I wish him the best of good fortune!

Ilya Shapiro on Supreme Court Confirmations

Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute testified on 20 July 2021 before the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court .  He made the following major points:

1. Politics has always been part of the confirmation process.
2. Confirmation fights are now driven by judicial philosophy.
3. Modern confirmations are different because the political culture is different.
4. Hearings have become kabuki theater.
5. Every nomination can have a big impact.
6. The hardest confirmations are when there's a potential for a big shift.
7. The Court rules on so many controversies that political battles are unavoidable.

He concluded:

The ever‐​expanding size and scope of the federal government has increased the number and complexity of issues brought under Washington’s control, while the collection of those new federal powers into the administrative state has transferred ultimate decision‐​making authority to the courts. The imbalance between the executive branch and Congress has made the Supreme Court the decider both of controversial social issues and complex policy disputes.

So should we reform the confirmation process? I’ve come to the conclusion that we should get rid of hearings altogether, that they’ve served their purpose but now inflict greater cost than any informational benefit. With instantly searchable records that nominees now have, is there any need to subject them, and the country, to an inquisition? Or maybe senators could hold hearings in closed session.

In the end, all “reform” discussion boils down to re‐​arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And this Titanic is not the appointment process, but the ship of state. The fundamental problem is the politicization not of the process but of the product. The judicial debates we’ve seen the last few decades were never really about the nominees themselves. They’re about the Court’s direction.

The reason we have these heated battles is that the federal government is making too many decisions for such a large, diverse, and pluralistic country. Let Congress decide truly national issues like defense or (actually) interstate (actual) commerce, but let states and localities make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. Let Texas be Texas and California be California. That’s the only way we’re going to defuse tensions in Washington, whether in the halls of Congress or in the marble palace of the highest court in the land.

My Comments: 

Basically, the federal government is too damned big and presumptuously and injudiciously has taken on far too many powers, some of which should have been left at the state or local government levels.  People who live in different parts of the country commonly have different interests and values.  The many federal powers often conflict with these differing interests and values.  The federal legislative branch has defaulted on making those constitutional decisions that were assigned to it, allowing the executive branch to grow into a behemoth administrative, regulatory state issuing many controversial edicts, often bafflingly formulated.  As a result of the burgeoning administrative state, the Supreme Court has had make many more decisions regarding both "controversial social issues and complex policy disputes."  Ignoring the wisdom of the Constitution sure has disastrous consequences!

You have done good work here Ilya Shapiro.

Celebrating the Declaration of Independence Day

The Second Continental Congress agreed upon the 13 colonies of America becoming independent on 2 July 1776.  We should celebrate Independence Day on 2 July, as Benjamin Franklin thought we would.

There was a still more important event on the 4th of July, 1776.  The Declaration of Independence was signed by the members of the Second Continental Congress on 4 July.  This document stated the fundamental principles that would define the United States of  America.  These ideas were uniquely revolutionary in 1776.  Revolutions as uprisings were not too unusual, but the principles of the Declaration of Independence were entirely innovative as a basis for a new nation.

On this great day, this Declaration of Independence Day, we should read these inspiring principles and renew our commitment to them.  Our beloved Declaration of Independence says:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

No nation had ever committed itself to the principle that all men were created equal before.  No government had ever stated that its purpose was to secure the rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Before this vision of the United States of America, nations had been dedicated to a few among a given tribal group or ethnic group.  In rare cases, a foreigner found to be particularly useful to the ruling oligarchy might be accepted into consideration for the nation's benefits.  But in the new United States, whose people were primarily English, Scots, Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes, Portuguese, Africans, and American Indians by ethnic origin at the time, all men were created equal, with unalienable rights, which it was the proper purpose of the government they were forming to secure for them.

Yes, the government long did not properly and morally follow through on the implementation of this principle for those ethnically African or American Indian, but its actions could always now be held up against the yardstick it had clearly stated in its foundational principles.  This universal recognition of human rights had never, ever been done by any nation before and is very rarely done even now by any nation.  The Declaration of Independence made the Civil War almost inevitable.  It also made the end of Jim Crow laws virtually inevitable. 

The Declaration of Independence puts a principled duty upon each of us to throw off the attempts of Government to abuse our individual rights.  It states that when Government fails to earn its legitimacy by ruling with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we have both the right and the duty to provide new guards for the security of our universal and individual rights.

Our Constitution is a great document also.  The Constitution puts the means in place to organize the powers of government in such form as to achieve the goals and principles given to us in our sacred Declaration of Independence.  Our Constitution cannot be properly understood if this is not realized.  The context for interpreting our Constitution is the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  The widespread failure to understand the severe constitutional limits on the power of the federal government is a consequence of a refusal to recognize the fundamental principles of The Declaration of Independence.

Today, the 4th of July, is the greatest of all American holidays.  It is Declaration of Independence Day!  Love this day, love our Declaration of Independence, and celebrate its inspiring principles of universal individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  If we do not do this, we will surely lose our ability to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  It is the exercise of these rights that makes life worth living.  Live free or die!

Kamala Harris Identifies a Primary Root Cause of Illegal Immigration to the USA and Fertilizes the Root

Kamala Harris has made a big deal of her task to identify and address the root causes of illegal immigration into the USA.  She has identified a primary root cause: the illegal immigrants leave their home countries because they are very corrupt and gang violence is unbearable.

The violent gangs make huge sums of money selling drugs, dealing in sex trafficing, selling contraband arms, and guiding illegal aliens into the USA.  They infiltrate the USA with their gang members and extract post-immigration services from the illegal aliens they shepard into the USA as payment for their services.  The wealth they gather from these activities make the gangs and drug cartels all the more dominant and lawless in their home countries of Central America, Mexico, and South America.  This dominance makes life for many of the people in these countries a horrible experience.

Just as the Biden administration chooses to ignore the biowarfare that the Chinese Communist Party has inflicted upon the world by unleashing Covid-19 on it, they also ignore the fact that the Chinese Communist Party happily supplies the drug cartels with the chemicals to make and distribute the killing drug fentanyl.  The Chinese government helps the drug cartel predators to prosper.  The Big Guy and his family syndicate have long been in the employ of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as Russian and other oligarchs of several of the lawless countries of far eastern Europe and Asia, so his feckless response to the horrors they visit on civilized nations is to be expected.

What is the Biden administration response to the flood of illegal immigrants over our southern border?  They encourage it.  In the process, they are feeding the drug cartels and all of their heinous gang activities.  They do this in part because they intend to make the illegal aliens into citizens one day and expect to garner most of their votes.  The Democratic Socialist Party is always motivated by a rabid power lust.  There is nothing so important to the leadership of that party as the thrill that comes with forcing others to do their will.  Because they want the US to be inundated with illegal immigrants, they are enriching and empowering the drug cartel gangs.  These gangs make life in their home countries unbearable and push ever more immigrants to enter the US illegally.  The root cause of immigration is thus well fertilized by the Biden administration.

Given the Biden family syndicate relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and many oppressive oligarchs of other countries, one has to wonder if they are also tied into the drug cartels.  Hunter Biden has real expertise in drugs, unlike in natural gas, pipelines, banking, and defense work where he, his uncle, and the Big Guy have made much money in their shady dealings with evil foreign actors.  Such a direct financial link with the drug cartels sure would fit the Biden family syndicate pattern and it would go far in explaining the obviously harmful open-border policies of the Biden administration.  Known immoral behavior patterns should not be ignored.  Serious investigation is needed into the motivation for the open border policies being followed by this generally wrongheaded and immoral administration filled with special interest Swamp Creatures with no regard for the welfare of American citizens.

The Terror of Carbon Dioxide Induced Human Extinction and the Dismal Ideology

 Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute conducted a survey of 2,000 likely American voters from 29 April to 3 May 2021 on the issue of climate change.  The poll found that 55% of likely voters believe that climate change is primarily caused by humans, while 45% believed it was primarily caused by long-term planetary trends.

Numerous Democrat politicians, bureaucrats, and media pundits have informed us for several decades that humans or the Earth face an existential threat if mankind does not cease to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere within 10 - 12 years.  To date, this existential threat has proven about as dangerous and catastrophic as a newborn puppy.

The Rasmussen - Heartland poll asked likely voters to identify themselves as Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, or the Not Sure category I hate, since one may be very sure of one's ideology but simply not fit into the other choices.  The poll found that 21% of likely voters who consider themselves to be Moderate and 21% who are Liberal believe that if global carbon dioxide emissions continue at a rate comparable to that of the last decade, then humans will become extinct or nearly extinct due to climate change within 50 years.  For Conservatives, only 12% believe this early demise for humans due to climate change.  OK, that 12% is still an absurd portion of Conservatives.  52% of Liberals believe human extinction or near extinction will occur within the next 100 years.  43% of Moderates agree, while 23% of Conservatives agree.

There are tens of millions of Americans who ascribe to each of these ideologies.  Even 23% of Conservatives are many millions of Americans who face the dismal prospect of human extinction or near extinction within 100 years.  Yet, how much more dismal is the ideology that has 52% of those ascribing to it in a state of terror, presumably, of human extinction within 100 years?  Would such believers want to have children even, or if they did, would they not be irresponsible?  Perhaps this belief is a meaningful factor in the falling birthrate of Americans documented by the last couple of census reports.  If it is, then the reproduction of Liberals should be significantly lower than that of Conservatives!

Further results of the poll show that Liberals are much more likely to exaggerate the amount of warming that has occurred since the late 1800s.  60% of them believe there has been more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit warming.  In comparison, 36% of Conservatives believe warming has exceeded 3 degrees.  Even NOAA's exaggerated warming since the 1880 to 1900 average is only 2.14 degrees Fahrenheit.  Such warming would be far more beneficial than harmful.  More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the present concentration has virtually no warming effect and is great for plant growth.  This in no catastrophe.

This is only one example of the many ways in which Liberals have a dreary, dismal worldview.  It fits nicely with a belief in other dismal viewpoints such as systemic racism, the belief that some ethnic groups are incompetent to manage their own lives, the denial of the ability of humans to improve their standard of living by living productive lives, and the believe that humans are always a threat to the environment in myriad ways.  It has to make a life miserable to be such an ingrained pessimist.  This goes way beyond seeing a glass as half empty instead of half full.  This is a determination to see the glass which is really full as being almost empty.  It is a consistent denial of reality.

 

On Covid-19 Spending from letter from Craig Rucker of CFACT

Adjusted for today’s dollars the Second World War cost $4.1 trillion. 

The United States just committed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion, boosting total taxpayer pandemic spending to over $6 trillion.

This is half again what it cost to liberate the world from fascism. 

We posted policy details and an extensive financial breakdown to CFACT.org.

The U.S. has not yet finished spending the funds from the last rounds of COVID relief.

Sadly, combating the virus and its economic impact is merely the tip of this latest $1.9 trillion fiscal iceberg.  The bulk of the spending in the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021" goes to a colossal left-wing wish list and a cornucopia of good old-fashioned government waste, albeit on a 21st century scale.

The Foundation for Economic Education calculated that total federal COVID spending just hit $41,870 per taxpayer.

Less than one percent of the latest spending goes to vaccines.  Only ten percent is directly related to the virus. 

Here's a sampling of where the rest will go:

• $350 billion to cities, states and Indian tribes, including those running fiscal surpluses.  The methodology was changed to favor states that voted for Biden.  Enjoy your $26 billion windfall, California!
• $169 billion to schools and colleges, including those that refuse to open.  Where's the party teachers' unions?
• $422 billion in $1,400 per-person stimulus checks, including to those who never missed a paycheck and even federal prisoners.
• $58 billion to bail out union pension plans.
• $25 billion in increased Obamacare subsidies.
• $30 billion to AMTRAK and transit agencies.
• Expansion of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600, extending the credit to people who don't work for the first time, effectively ending the Clinton-era work-based welfare reforms.
• $1 billion in loan forgiveness for farmers based on "racial justice."  Didn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination based on race?  The Left is calling this the start of "reparations."
• $50 million in environmental justice grants.  Whom do you think will receive those?

America's national debt is approaching $30 trillion.  What if (heaven forbid) we had to fight an actual world war?

Craig Rucker is President of CFACT.

Charles' Comments:

The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly highlighted the many harms promulgated by our governments.  The NIH and Dr. Fauci provided funding for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in a Wuhan biological laboratory known to have inadequate safety procedures and whose employees were the first known to suffer the Covid-19 disease.  Then the federal, most state, and many local governments over-reacted with shutdown orders to large portions of the private sector economy.  Most schools were shutdown, forever depriving American children of about a year of much needed education.  Now, many state and local governments are inhibiting the distribution of the vaccines.  The Craig Rucker letter above directs our attention to still more of the harm our federal government has done to us.

Those who rule in America are incompetent to perform the excessive scope of function they have taken upon themselves in their quest for power.  Those who desire power over others are generally people of low moral character as well.  When they are not intending to do harm, they are sufficiently unthinking that they simply do not understand the harm they are doing.  Craig Rucker ends his letter with that classic Ronald Reagan quote:

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."