Anton to Lead State Department Policy Planning thumbnail

Anton to Lead State Department Policy Planning

By Joseph Addington

Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

Editors’ Note:  We find this appointment to be of great significance. It shows the growing influence of Conservative thinking on President Trump as opposed to some of his appointments during his first administration, although Anton did play a lesser role in Trump I. It also shows the growth of influence within the Conservative movement by the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College. The lecture below gives you a taste of Mr. Anton’s thinking.  He is considered a “Straussian” and a follower of Harry Jaffa.  Jaffa was known as a great Lincoln scholar and a little-known tip; Jaffa wrote the speech for Barry Goldwater with the famous line: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” 

State of the Union: The longtime Trump loyalist will serve as the director of policy planning.

Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.

Anton is a notable thinker associated with the New Right. He studied at the Claremont Institute under Harry V. Jaffa and has written a number of notable pieces for Claremont publications over the years, including the famous essay “The Flight 93 Election.

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*****

This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Trump Must Save Industries From Green Fanatics thumbnail

Trump Must Save Industries From Green Fanatics

By Douglas Pollock

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

We must read with caution the Chinese Communist Party’s claims about how much wind and solar generation it has achieved.

China likes to present itself as “green” before the eyes of the international community by, for instance, justifying its massive increase in coal-fired power plants by saying they are needed to back up the additional wind and solar plants (Ronald Stein and George Harris “Stop the ‘green hallucinationists’ plan to close all 200 coal power plants”, America Out Loud News).

However, coal-fired power stations are unsuitable to back up weather-dependent renewables, as they cannot ramp up fast enough to maintain stability on a power grid when the Sun or wind decide to go away. Thus, either the Chinese renewable generation figures are way lower than those that are published or China is using inefficient gas generation on a large scale to back up its 1,050 Gigawatts installed wind and solar capacity.

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In 2023, China generated 15.5% of its electricity (some 1470 TWh of “sustainable” generation out of 9460 TWh in total) by wind and solar power. Given its installed capacity and its average capacity factor, this generation fraction places China on the edge of the limit above which “renewables” begin to lose their efficacy, that is, when the nameplate wind and solar generation capacity exceeds the mean hourly demand on the grid.

So far, China has not committed the Western economic hara-kiri of pointlessly exceeding this limit. Once the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power has exceeded the limit, further wind and solar installations will contribute little or nothing to saving the planet from non-existent, catastrophic manmade global warming, while the contribution of the additional wind and solar generation actually dispatched to the grid decays exponentially and both the excess installed generating capacity and the cost of electricity (already the costliest of all forms of generation) exponentially increase.

This is only the beginning. In this scenario, both new and existing wind and solar generators will receive less revenue per GW of installed capacity. This is where government bailouts, on top of initial investment subsidies, kick in. Thus, the cost of electricity is greatly aggravated by the introduction of expensive and damaging market interferences such as cancellation, curtailment or constraint generation orders and capacity payments that have the effect of subsidizing wind and solar generators for an ever-increasing non-existent delivery of power into the grid. It is the customers who pay.

While the United States is currently exempt from this Western nonsense, the U.K., Europe, Australia and Canada are not. Nor is a tiny country like Chile, which, back in 1998, Bill Clinton called “the most precious jewel in the Latin American crown” and which, according to Al Gore and the UN, is the most aggressive developing country in the world in its climate mitigation measures. In plain English, Chile is increasing its “sustainable” generating capacity while “sustainably” destroying its economy.

Yet, the U.S., under Biden, was desperate to join the exclusive European green suicide pact.

In 2023, China had 1,142 coal-fired power plants in operation, by far the world’s highest number. India comes in second place with 282 and the U.S. in third place with 210. However, Stein’s article reveals that the Biden administration is not only increasing power prices by subsidizing costly wind and solar generation: it is also imposing onerous regulations under which some 170 of the 210 remaining coal-fired plants in the U.S. are scheduled to be decommissioned by 2030. However, the necessary corresponding increase in backup gas-fired generating capacity is nowhere to be seen.

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And what is the potential cost of the United States’ following Europe in destroying the free market in electricity generation?

The dismantling of coal-fired generation – the most affordable, abundant and stable source – and its replacement by wind and solar farms that hike electricity prices, taxes, subsidies and regulations while destabilizing the grid and rendering it internationally uncompetitive, will inevitably precipitate a severe decline in economic growth.

The resultant crippling terms-of-trade disadvantage will drive an abrupt collapse of capital investment and an exodus of manufacturing industries and jobs, accompanied by inflation, unemployment and an increase in the gap between rich and poor in America.

Doesn’t all of this sound familiar?

Over the past seven years, for every unit of coal-fired generating capacity decommissioned worldwide, 2.3 units of that same capacity have been added in China and India. In the United States, that ratio is 3.2.

Any hope?

With President Donald Trump back in office, he will have four years to overturn this willful and yet pointless economic suicide and restore America’s international competitiveness.

This is a smart first step toward making “America great again.”

*****

This article was published by CFACT, the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Five Tactics to End Corporate Wokeness

By Isaac Willour

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

We can make serious progress against ESG activism in the next four years.

It’s time to ramp up the fight against corporate bias. The next four years will be difference-making ones.
For years, corporate activists have infiltrated the boardrooms and governance structures of America’s biggest companies and brands, destroying their focus on fiduciary duty and politicizing them through a plethora of activist-driven ESG and DEI initiatives. As a proxy analyst, I see the fruits of corporate activism everywhere, from shareholder proposals pressuring brands like Walmart into auditing their “racial equity” to existing corporate policies discriminating against religious and/or conservative employees.

For conservatives interested in doing the work of depoliticizing American businesses, it shouldn’t just be about stopping the current ambitions of ESG activists—it should be about undoing all the gains they’ve made in company culture and policy. And it shouldn’t be simply about decrying companies’ biased decisions, but about working to bring them back to a politically neutral baseline so that such decisions don’t happen again.

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Conservatives have been given the massive opportunity of a political environment featuring a president and vice president who are vocally anti-DEI and anti-ESG. As someone in the trenches of the day-to-day fight against ESG activists, the Right should be concentrating its fire on these five areas.

1. Diminish the power of the Human Rights Campaign

Formed in 1980, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is one of the most powerful nonprofits actively pushing corporations to advance progressivism through its corporate policies.The HRC’s Corporate Equality Index pressures companies to check a growing and increasingly radical list of boxes to be considered perfectly “inclusive.” To score a perfect 100 on the Index, a business has to implement diversity programs for its suppliers and include similar metrics for its executives, as well as provide gender-affirming care to its employees, including puberty blockers for children.

Far from its stated goal of merely advancing equality, the HRC has become a vehicle for unbridled social activism masquerading as inclusion. This is why many companies that have backed off of corporate wokeness in the recent past, including Tractor Supply and Coors, have severed their ties to the HRC (with the HRC notably smearing and seeking to undermine them in response). Many more businesses should follow suit. If we want to get politics out of business, it’s time to leverage shareholder and customer influence to end corporate partnerships with radical left-wing organizations that seek to replace a business focus with political goals.

2. Continue to shed light on discriminatory DEI programs

Since the death of George Floyd, America’s obsession with race has infected the corporate sphere, with major companies spending millions on programs designed to advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Unsurprisingly, many of those programs are now coming under fire: letters from 17 state financial officials and major players in the pro-fiduciary movement urge companies to refocus on fiduciary duty and away from the legal and reputational issues that many DEI programs create. Such scrutiny comes as no surprise—far from merely confronting racial inequalities, major corporations like IBM have been criticized for implementing diversity programs that expressly use racial quotas to achieve their desired goals, with a new study casting serious doubt on whether many diversity programs actually create unity at all.

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Whether by explicit quotas based on skin color or training programs that advance modern “antiracist” tenets such as systemic racism or unconscious bias, many DEI programs feature the very same identitarian worldview that Americans roundly rejected at the ballot box. If we’re to decrease focus on social activism and increase focus on business success that lifts up Americans of all colors, the time is now to expose such radical initiatives.

3. Combat ESG’s chronic anti-energy bias

It’s no secret that many modern “sustainability” initiatives are simply running cover for activist agendas that seek divestment from critical sectors of the energy business like oil and gas. This was the driving force behind one of the biggest corporate stories of the year, when Exxon Mobil faced down a challenge from activist shareholders outraged at the concept of an oil and gas company doing business in the oil and gas industry.

Although the challenge failed at Exxon Mobil, such anti-energy stances have succeeded at other companies, to the point where companies like BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Truist Financial are actively restricted from doing business with state entities in West Virginia and Texas due to their anti-energy stances. While a focus on sustainability may sound harmless or even beneficial, state financial officers in red states are seeing the effects that poorly developed net zero initiatives are having on their constituencies. The decidedly more pro-fossil fuel approach of the incoming administration could mean a rethinking of ESG activist-driven “sustainable” initiatives at many companies.

4. Realize how many corporate policies disenfranchise religious/conservative employees—and why

As a proxy analyst who engages with investor relations (IR) teams at many different companies, you’d be surprised at the amount of anti-religious sentiment that (consciously or unconsciously) is baked into corporate policy. I’m talking about everything from corporate gift-matching policies that exclude religious nonprofits to companies that have employee resource groups for sexual and ethnic minorities—but not employees of faith. My colleagues and I are finding a constant theme at many of these companies: no one brought up these issues to them. One IR rep we spoke to recently was surprised at their company’s own restrictions on charity matching for religious nonprofits. Is this a sign of corporate bias? Of course—but it’s also shining a spotlight on our lack of attention to the institutional ground game.

Pro-ESG activists have been working to advance their agenda for years, an agenda that’s resulted not only in countless bad headlines highlighting the excesses of woke capitalism (Target and Bud Light being the most prominent examples) but created policies and objectives that have distracted businesses from their focus on maximizing return. And conservatives have fallen behind in that fight. Our push against shareholder activism and ESG is a mission to remind executives that progressivism is not the only viewpoint held by their shareholders. Pushing back in the spaces that the Left now dominates is a vital step forward.

5. Take control of proxy voting

The latest election is a reminder that leveraging influence works. The same principle applies in corporate America: if you’re a shareholder, you should be thinking seriously about who manages the voting of your shares at the companies you own. For too long, organizations that eschew conservative values to advance their own activist agenda have bafflingly been entrusted with controlling the way financial influence is leveraged on behalf of conservative investors, be they individuals, nonprofits, or educational institutions. It’s why the firm I work for, Bowyer Research, created a set of ESG skeptic proxy voting guidelines. If you wouldn’t let someone who doesn’t share your values fill in your presidential ballot on Election Day, why would you do that with your proxy ballot?

When it comes to corporate America, the battle for influence is often won by the loudest voices. Taken on these terms, the silent majority has lost for years. To fix that, it’s now time to pay heed to our ground game. As the grand strategy for the Right shifts for the next four years, we can’t afford to forget the tactics that can win the battle. Depoliticizing corporate America is a battle worth fighting and winning—for its shareholders, for its customers, and for everyone that the free enterprise system serves.

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The True Cost of Wind Energy: Wind energy is one of our MOST EXPENSIVE options! thumbnail

The True Cost of Wind Energy: Wind energy is one of our MOST EXPENSIVE options!

By John Droz, Jr.

Periodically I get asked: what is the TRUE cost of industrial wind energy?

It seems like that should be a relatively straightforward answer, but it is anything but.

To appreciate what is going on, we need to understand the Big Picture regarding wind energy. (FYI, the same applies to solar.) The system is setup to grease the skids for wind energy developers — not ratepayers. When it comes to wind energy, we are dealing with 21st century snake oil salespeople. They have a sophisticated multi-part strategy to profit at the public’s expense…

Their FIRST major strategy is to sell politicians on the bogus concept that our electrical Grid should be inclusive — i.e., include ALL electrical energy sources (whether they are good or bad. An all of the above policy makes no technical or economic or environmental sense. (For a discussion of this, see here.) My alternative motto is that our electrical grid should include all of the sensible.

Their SECOND major strategy is to sell politicians on the false belief that we need enormous amounts of industrial wind energy to “save the planet from pending climate catastrophe.” Ignoring the accuracy of the Climate Change fear-mongering aspect, the reality is that there has never been a genuine scientific study that has concluded that wind energy saves a consequential amount of CO2! In fact, there have been multiple scientific studies that have concluded that wind energy can make Climate Change WORSE! (See here for some examples.)

Their THIRD major strategy is to sell politicians and the public on the illusion that industrial wind energy is inexpensive — so we should do it anyway (irrespective of points #1 and #2 above). So what is the true cost of industrial wind energy?

Why this is not a simple question to answer is because wind promoters are VERY well aware that industrial wind energy is MUCH more expensive than our other conventional sources of electricity (fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro), so to get politicians and the public onboard, they have gone to EXTREME lengths to obfuscate wind energy’s REAL cost.

Here are ten sample examples of wind energy costs that are NOT acknowledged by wind promoters, so are NOT factored into any of their “cost of wind energy” claims:

How much is this? This objective report says: “While the original justification for the PTC was to boost a nascent industry, the PTC continues to subsidize a mature industry to the expected tune of nearly $24 billion from 2016-2020 according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. And that estimate will almost certainly be too low…”

A good example is the $100 million for wind energy in the 2022 “Infrastructure” bill. As it spells out in a separate legislative document, this taxpayer money is for such nonsense as “To support the integration of wind energy technologies with the electric grid and other energy technologies and systems” and “To support the domestic wind industry, workforce, and supply chain.” Billions of federal dollars are hidden in wind related costs (e.g., see here).

A Nuclear power facility (for example), will have:

a) one transmission line, and

b) the distance will be relatively short, as it will almost always be located relatively near a population center.

On the other hand, a very rough equivalent of wind energy will have:

a) many transmission lines, and

b) will be located a considerable distance from population centers.

The transmission cost difference is substantial — but none of it is attributed to the cause: wind energy.

The Electric Grid needs to have Supply and Demand balanced in a fraction of a second. Since wind energy is 100% unpredictable — and frequently goes to zero — 100% auxiliary power is necessary. For a variety of technical and economic reasons, the most appropriate auxiliary source is almost always gas. However, as with the preceding items, the cost and operation of whatever auxiliary source is used, is almost never attributed to the reason for it: wind energy.

This is a bit complicated, but once you understand it you will almost certainly say: this makes no sense whatsoever! That’s because it doesn’t.

A quickie summary is: let’s say that a Grid estimates that it needs 900 MWH next Tuesday. Five sources each bid to supply 200 MWH of it: Wind @ 1¢/KWH; Coal @ 2¢/KWH; Hydro @ 3¢/KWH; Nuclear @ 4¢/KWH; and Gas @ 6¢/KWH. The Grid takes the price of the highest accepted source (Gas), and then PAYS ALL THE SUPPLIERS THAT PRICE! Here is a good pictorial example of what happens.

What that means is that (in this case) wind gets 6¢/KWH (along with everyone else). But the wind people advertise that they are low cost (1¢/KWH) even though they got paid 6¢/KWH — and even though they knew that 1¢/KWH would never be the price they were paid (based on how the auction works). Dishonest.

Let’s say that Nuclear is unable to supply all their 200 MWH of electricity next Tuesday, as they had committed to. In this case the Grid manager heavily fines Nuclear, because the Grid manager now has to buy electricity on the spot market, which is quite expensive — so the fine is fair to ratepayers.

Let’s say that Wind is unable to supply all their 200 MWH of electricity next Tuesday, as they had committed to. In this case the Grid manager does NOT fine wind, even though the Grid manager now has to buy electricity on the spot market, which is quite expensive. This is NOT fair to ratepayers. Further (like everything above), this extra Grid expense is NOT attributed to Wind — even though they caused it!

As if these Grid breaks aren’t enough, when the wind developers see the handouts that they are readily given, this green lights them to ask for more! Contrary to our traditional electricity sources, wind energy is not predictable — which is the excuse used for paying for underperformance of a bid. But, stunningly, in most cases wind energy also gets paid for over-performance as well! In other words, if they produce 100MWH that is not needed, in many cases they get paid to dump that! Of course, those payments are not attributable to wind energy’s cost.

There are numerous environmental costs to wind host communities — e.g., health costs to nearby residences, reduction of the values of nearby homes, etc., etc. There are multiple other costs that are spelled out here. No surprise, but none of these substantial costs are attributed to wind energy.

There are several of these costs, like farmers reducing or stopping their crop production (after they sign a lease to host turbines)… Adverse military consequences (e.g., interfering with radar, etc.)… Trees taken down (which are CO2 absorbers). Etc. None of these are factored into wind energy’s cost.

Some major turbine components are extraordinarily problematic from several perspectives. Rare Earth Metals are a fine example. (Note: some 2 to 4 thousand pounds of Rare Earths are in every turbine!) The environmental and health cost of Rare Earths is staggering — but much of that is happening in China. Even though wind promoters say that climate impacts anywhere in the world are important to address, none of them are publicly objecting to this wind energy cost.

This is a somewhat complicated, technical subject, so the above is a layperson’s summary. The takeaway is that — despite what the lobbyists are pitching to the non-critically thinking public — the real cost of wind energy is 2-3 times the cost of nuclear and other conventional sources of electricity. Solar is higher than that!

©2024 All rights reserved.

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The New Left’s Total Victory in 2024 thumbnail

The New Left’s Total Victory in 2024

By Ken Braun

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: The title of this excellent essay seems paradoxical. What victory? Well, the radical progressive ‘New Left’ really did capture the Democrat party in recent decades and their hold on the party led to a solid rejection of the woke, absurd and destructive ideology detached from reality by American voters with a strong mandate for Donald Trump to return to common sense, civil society and governance by We the People. Political clowns like Kamala Harris and AOC and their ilk indeed represent the New Left’s Total Victory in 2024. We should celebrate loudly the rejection of their victory by decent and liberty-loving Americans in a stunning defeat of the radical Left’s ideology.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

George Orwell

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According to exit polling from Blueprint, a firm built to assist Democratsthe Trump campaign’s decision this fall to hit Kamala Harris on her transgender agenda provided Trump a 25-percentage-point advantage with swing voters. And for the swing voters who ended up swinging to Trump, the gap was a thunderous 28 points.

Few issues swung voters harder against Harris. While Trump was the primary beneficiary, the triumph also belonged to the New Left.

In 2019 the American Civil Liberties Union sent volunteers to public forums to ask difficult questions of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. This was augmented by an ACLU candidate survey covering several woke concerns. Without this, Harris might never have so publicly pinned herself to such extreme positions as supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for federal inmates.

Race vs. Class

Like most of the supposedly left-leaning nonprofits, the ACLU has clearly been captured by New Left identity politics. But it wasn’t always so. In 1969, as the name implies, the public interest law firm was more likely to promote the civil liberties of Americans, including criminal defendants, labor union members, and communists. Instead of New Left, the ACLU was once decidedly old left, prioritizing the interests of workers, not the woke.

The New Left was still pretty “new” when the annual (and, as it transpired, final) convention of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occurred in June 1969. A direct ideological/historical line connects that long ago dispute with the defeat of Kamala Harris in 2024.

The victorious faction in the 1969 SDS battlespace would soon morph into the domestic terrorist sect known as the Weather Underground. The Weather faction was New Left, aligned with what we now call “identity politics” or “woke-ism.” Their founding document, the “Weatherman Manifesto,” promoted an alliance with black communist revolutionaries, such as the Black Panthers, as the proper path to ousting capitalism and imperialism. They were militantly opposed to police, the Vietnam War, and the military. One of their role models was John Brown, the violent abolitionist and insurrectionist.

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Race trumped class as the animating force of the Weather Underground, and—if they were white—even Marx’s “workers of the world” could be the enemy. According to the Manifesto, “virtually all of the white working class also has short-range privileges from imperialism . . . which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the imperialists.”

The Weather agenda was opposed within SDS by the Progressive Labor (PL) Party, which considered the white working class as the natural allies of the revolutionary left.

The PL faction in 1969 was a communist revolutionary sect that was old left, committed to the “workers of the world, unite!” message. They were highly critical of the Weather faction’s fixation on race-based disputes. Then as now, the class-based Marxists believed identity politics was—at best—a distraction from the working-class issues and—at worst—an obsession that would actively alienate the white working class.

Remnants of the dispute still exist within the communist left today. In 2019, the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) was one of the most strident and effective critics of the New York Times’1619 Project, a historically inept portrayal of the American founding as a triumph for slavery.

In one essay about the 1619 Project a pair of WSWS writers noted that the “historical slogan of the socialist movement is ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ not ‘Races of the World, Divide!’” “The racial narrative is intended to replace one that is based on the analysis of objectively existing social and class interests,” they wrote. “The New York Times . . . has a very real political agenda, which is closely coordinated with the Democratic Party.”

Warnings

Not communist, but no less concerned with the Democratic Party’s discounting of the working class is Ruy Teixeira. A former staffer at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, he is the co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?—a book that profiles the Democrats’ abandonment of the working class. At his Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, he spent most of the last two years before the election warning Democrats to turn from the woke identity politics brainworm.

In 2022, he posted an analysis urging the Democrats to distance themselves from radical climate groups such as the Sierra Club, promoters of “defund the police,” and nonprofit advocates of other woke obsessions.

“Moreover, to the extent Democratic politicians want to move in a more moderate direction and get closer to the sweet spot of American public opinion, progressive organizations, as currently constituted stand in the way,” he wrote. “From cracking down on criminals and putting public safety first and foremost to securing the border and containing illegal immigration to pursuing a clean energy transition that includes an “all of the above” approach to meeting America’s current energy needs to keeping abortion safe, legal and rare but accepting some restrictions, particularly past the first trimester, progressive organizations persistently pressure Democratic politicians not to move in these directions that are clearly called for by public opinion and common sense.”

Democrats didn’t listen.

Political Autopsy

“Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters,” wrote Teixeira, in a political autopsy following the 2024 vote. “How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.”

That Teixeira had to write these obvious sentences even once, let alone over the course of years and in a whole book, demonstrates just how total the New Left victory has been. The Weather Underground once had to hide from the law, let alone respectable Democrats. Today, the woke New Left tells Democrats what the laws should be.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Time to Ditch the Diamond Lanes thumbnail

Time to Ditch the Diamond Lanes

By Bruce Bialosky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

When you are in business it is essential to try innovations for enhancing your success.  Some of those innovations work, but some do not.  Some that work do so for a time and then stop working.  As a business operator, it is vital to recognize when to terminate your project and move on.  However, the government doesn’t often know when to move on from a promising idea.  Diamond lanes have outlived their benefit and should be retired.

The first diamond lane (actually known as “high-occupancy lane” or “HOV”) was introduced in 1976.  It was on the Santa Monica (I-10) freeway in California.  The lane was dedicated to buses and cars with three or more passengers. 

There are now HOV lanes in 20 states covering thousands of miles of highways.  They operate under different rules depending on the state.  One of the annoying rules in California is you can only merge into the lane at specific points that often don’t make sense.  That causes many people to merge in and out against the rules, breaking a law that is never enforced.   

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Why is it time to ditch them?  The simple answer is they don’t work.  

It is rare to see the traffic pattern significantly different with a diamond lane compared to the normal traffic flow in the other lanes.  Yes, there are times when you are clogged up in traffic in the left-hand lane while cars are passing you in the diamond lane.  You feel a little bit of envy.  You wish you had a mannequin next to you with a baseball cap on so you can veer left and speed ahead.  Those times are rare.   

There are times when you are in the HOV lane, and it is moving better than the other lanes, only to have it clog up, and now the other lanes are moving much better. You exit the HOV lane and move over. You notice that the reason the HOV lane is clogged is that people who should be driving in lane four (the right lane for slow drivers) are clogging up things by barely driving the speed limit while everybody else is zipping by. The diamond lane provides no flexibility.  

That is the problem.  It has been fifty years, and these lanes have not gotten close to what they were designed to do. The people who want to design our lives have tried to get us to be in our cars with one or more other people.  

Most of the time we don’t arrange our lives to have multiple people in the car.  You go to work where you are with people who live nowhere near you.  You then go to a business meeting, and you are the only one needed at the meeting.  Or you are meeting a friend for lunch, and they are coming from a different direction.  Then you go to a family dinner and the four of you come from four distinct locations.  That is how life often works, and the state planners have been unable to change that.  People get into cars together when it is convenient and/or it makes sense for their daily activities.

In the minds of those planners, people who drive in a car by themselves are doing two things.  First, they are clogging the highways.  Second, they are destroying the environment with their single-occupancy vehicles.  I am sure that is why they maintain these lanes today because they have all become climate change evangelists.  

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A recent proposal for the 605 freeway actually planned to remove the HOV lane and replace it with the bucolic ExpressLane, which is a fee lane. Instead, a proposal was made to add an HOV lane. The entire project was scrapped.  

If the HOV program had been working and people had heeded the guidance of the government wonks pushing this program, it seems to me that they would have been forced to add a second diamond lane after all this time.  I have only seen two diamond lanes in limited applications where there are freeway transitions.  Virtually no one has changed their behavior because of this program in the past 50 years because it was ill-conceived in the first place.  Maybe they were fans of Field of Dreams.  You know, “If you build it, they will come.”  It worked out much better for Kevin Costner. 

The people overseeing this program have already admitted defeat for the purpose of getting people to double up in their cars.  They have authorized EVs to use the HOV lane.  I am sure they would authorize self-driving vehicles also.  At least a dozen states now allow EVs in the diamond lanes.  That is a terrible reason to pay extra for a vehicle that has a shorter lifespan.  

The question for California is what are they going to do with the diamond lanes when all these new EVs are mandated with 35% of sales in just two years, increasing to 68% by 2030?  Whether you believe that will happen or not, they certainly are going to need to add a lane or junk the program.  

The program was another well-meaning attempt by our enlightened overseers that never came to fruition. Much like all those bicycle lanes.  If they were really enlightened, they would put the program in the trash heap and admit defeat.  

*****

This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

RFK Jr. Wants Fluoride Out Of Water — And It’s Not Nearly As Crazy As His Detractors Claim thumbnail

RFK Jr. Wants Fluoride Out Of Water — And It’s Not Nearly As Crazy As His Detractors Claim

By The Daily Caller

The day before the election, Democratic Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar joined countless other liberals in mocking Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the latter’s suggestion that America reduce its high levels of fluoride.

“I was a little shocked that one of their closing arguments for Donald Trump was take the fluoride out of water,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Nov. 4. “I guess they’re ending with more cavities.”

Skepticism of fluoridated water had been lumped in by the liberal establishment with a host of other heterodox views, often dubbed “conspiracy theories,” held by Kennedy and his allies.

Kennedy has harshly criticized fluoride, calling it a neurotoxin and an industrial byproduct. He’s claimed the mineral can cause arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.

He has pledged that the Trump White House will recommend to communities that they remove it from their drinking supplies immediately after Trump takes office. Trump appeared to co-sign the proposal, saying it “sounds alright to me.”

CNN’s Abby Phillip invited Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Syra Madad onto her show the same day to deride Kennedy’s fluoride criticisms: “I do think there are some rocks to be thrown, frankly, at RFK Jr.”

Madad called Kennedy “dangerous” and said his views on fluoride were “against science.”

“It is safe. It’s not toxic,” Madad told the panel.

“When you look at adding in additional amounts of fluoride, even then, the studies have not proven any significant health adverse effects,” she continued.

But numerous other health officials and toxicologists believe Madad is wrong.

“I think that there is sufficient data now, largely from the epidemiological literature in multiple populations, done by different investigators, that early life exposure to fluoride is associated with an increased risk of IQ loss,” Dr. Linda Birnbaum, a board-certified toxicologist and former director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), told the Daily Caller.

Birnbaum headed the NTP, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), from 2009 to 2019. She is now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health, in addition to still contributing research to HHS.

During her tenure, the NTP conducted a systematic review of the published scientific literature on the association between fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment. It found that exposure to higher levels of fluoride — levels it categorized as 1.5 milligrams per liter of water or higher — are associated with lower IQ in children.

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has declared, “… the data support a consistent inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ.”

In the meta-analysis by NTP, 52 of 55 studies revealed a decrease in children’s IQ with an increase in fluoride. Internal…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) February 7, 2024

The review said there was insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion about the effects of exposure at 0.7 milligrams per liter, which is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) current recommended level for U.S. community water supplies.

However, Dr. Birnbaum told the Caller, the NTP is running a comprehensive meta-analysis of the data that will likely show the linked drop in IQ rate is occurring at rates well below the 1.5 milligrams per liter number.

In fact, while Dr. Birnbaum maintained she hasn’t yet seen the newest version of the meta-analysis, older versions she did see show “that it’s quite clear that there may be really no safe level of fluoride just like there’s no safe level for lead,” she said.

Nearly all of the studies the NTP reviewed concluded the mineral was neurotoxic, Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, told the Daily Caller.

The 1.5 number, which the NTP concluded with “moderate confidence” leads to lowered IQ in children, is in line with the World Health Organization, whose current guidelines suggest maintaining levels below that concentration will prevent dental fluorosis, a yellowing or visible calcification of the teeth caused by excessive fluoride exposure.

Cooper argued that the NTP’s report was partially political.

“If you were actually doing a real systematic dose response analysis of a Health Hazard Assessment, do you think you would just magically land on 1.5, which happens to be the World Health Organization’s number?” he asked. “It would be like point 82763, you know, I mean, it wouldn’t be 1.0, what happened? [The report] just coincided miraculously with the World Health Organization? That’s where politics was kind of embedded into this document.”

Cooper, who has spent over 14 years ringing alarm bells about fluoride, says his organization has repeatedly requested supporting studies from the CDC and the American Dental Association (ADA) that prove fluoride is safe but “after 80 years they had nothing.”

“They couldn’t confirm. They have no studies showing that low levels is safe for the developing brain. So here they are exposing 200 million Americans, 2 million pregnant women, 300,000 exclusively bottle-fed infants right at this very second to fluoridation in the drinking water. We have 64 studies showing that that’s harmful, that poses an extreme risk. They have zero studies confirming safety. And yet they want you to ask me what more evidence do I need to find.”

The CDC lauds fluoride as a landmark innovation in preventing tooth decay and caries, otherwise known as cavities. The agency calls community water fluoridation one of the “top ten public health achievements of the twentieth century.”

Thanks to water fluoridation in the U.S., the CDC claims “dental caries declined precipitously during the second half of the 20th century.”

But that precipitous drop has occurred in both fluoridated countries and non-fluoridated alike. Countries with no community water fluoridation like Iceland, Italy and Japan, have all seen even steeper drops in cavities, according to data from the WHO.

“Although the prevalence of caries varies between countries, levels everywhere have fallen greatly in the past three decades, and national rates of caries are now universally low. This trend has occurred regardless of the concentration of fluoride in water or the use of fluoridated salt, and it probably reflects use of fluoridated toothpastes and other factors, including perhaps aspects of nutrition,” KK Cheng, a professor of public health and the Director of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Applied Health Research, wrote in the British Medical Journal.

WHO data shows decay rates have dropped at the same rate in non-fluoridated countries: https://t.co/Tg8pLmkoR0 pic.twitter.com/jjFr8yxC2w

— Fluoride Action Network (@FluorideAction) March 18, 2016

Some western communities did remove fluoride from their water and actually saw their cavity rates decrease. Buffalo, New York, a city which removed fluoride in 2012, saw their rates of cavities for people between the ages of 12-65 drop, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.

Nine years after removing the mineral from their water supply, however, Buffalo began fluoridating again in September after families sued the city in a class action lawsuit, alleging their children had to receive more dental care as a result of the fluoride halt.

Despite the many studies and experts expressing concern over the mineral, CNN and Dr. Madad continued to push both its safety and efficacy in reducing cavities.

“Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral, it’s not a man-made mineral,” Madad told CNN.

Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral. It is an ionized form of the element fluorine. Yet Kennedy Jr. called it “industrial waste” in a Nov. 2 tweet.

On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S​. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 2, 2024

Fluoride does occur in nature, and in fact many of the studies evaluated in the NTP report were from international communities in China and India who do not fluoridate their public water supply, but simply have high natural levels of the mineral in their groundwater.

But the specific type of fluoride that’s added to American public water supplies is often a chemical byproduct from the fertilizer industry, Cooper explained.

Phosphate fertilizer giants, like The Mosaic Company, produce the precursor to fluoride as a byproduct of their fertilizer production process and then sell it off to dental supply companies and municipalities for their water supply, Cooper told the Caller.

Cooper says the byproduct is known within the industry as “scrubber liquor,” because it’s literally scrubbed from the side of smokestacks.

The chemical companies make a nice profit from this side business, Cooper told the Caller, however he added that if it were banned in public water supplies, it likely wouldn’t hurt their bottom line.

“It wouldn’t be a big deal for them if it went away economically, because they could just replace it with other markets, including in Africa and China, where they’re seeing an increase in fluoride toothpaste. They actually still use the same product, but it’s refined to pharmaceutical grade,” Cooper said.

While many public health agencies still sing the praises of fluoride’s anti-cavity benefits, some dentists say it’s not as effective in treating cavities as the CDC and others profess.

Dr. Staci Whitman, a Portland-based dentist, said she used to be militantly pro-fluoride until she started looking into it.

“I never questioned what my professors in dental school told me. I never questioned the data that was presented to me. I absolutely thought anyone that spoke out against it was lulu tin foil hat brigade, just a total kook,” she told the Caller.

Staci actively participated in pro-fluoride campaigns, handing out pamphlets detailing the benefits of the mineral and attending lectures and debates on the topic. It was at one of these debates where Dr. Whitman had an epiphany.

“I realized that these people representing antifluoride, if you will, they were very articulate, very professional, had a ton of science and data that I had never seen, never had even heard, never even knew there was potentially an issue with water fluoridation. It wasn’t even on my radar.”

Then, Dr. Whitman began to read. “I don’t know if I can support this anymore,” she realized. “And that was when I thought water fluoridation maybe worked, and now we know it really doesn’t. We know that fluoridated countries have the same decay rate as non-fluoridated countries.”

The vast majority of European countries do not fluoridate their water.

“Most of those countries have banned the practice because they view it as a medical experiment. It’s the only chemical we add to the water supply that’s not intended to treat the water. It’s intended to treat the consumer,” Cooper said.

Florida once again leading the way w/wise public health recs from @FLSurgeonGen

Almost all of Europe (gray👇) decided decades ago against fluoridating water; benefits unclear w/access to topical fluoride

2024 Cochrane review agrees

W/unclear benefits, why take risks of harms? https://t.co/cGDL9FZaSY pic.twitter.com/vCfSTsK9RN

— Tracy Høeg, MD, PhD (@TracyBethHoeg) November 23, 2024

Dr. Whitman said she went along with fluoridation because everybody else did.

“I literally was just making it up. I was just seeing what my professor said, which I would say, ‘Oh, look at you. No cavities. You must have grown up in a fluoridated community.’ I was just saying it because everyone else did. It was observational. That’s not science.”

Dr. Whitman pointed to the latest findings on community water fluoridation from the Cochrane Report, a systematic review of research in health care and health policy which she calls “the gold standard.”

Cochrane reviewed 21 studies of community water fluoridation and found the practice “may slightly increase the number of children who have no tooth decay in either their baby teeth or permanent teeth.”

However, “these results also included the possibility of little or no difference in tooth decay,” the report added.

Cavities are the largest chronic disease globally, affecting both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities alike, Dr. Whitman explained. Fluoride, she told the Caller, is not the problem. Rather, it’s the food we eat.

“No one gets cavities because of lack of fluoride,” she said.

“Ancestrally, we didn’t have fluoride in our lives. Look at the skulls from 10 or 12,000 years ago. The teeth are pristine. So what changed it was our diet. It was an agricultural revolution and the industrialized revolution we started adding sugar and flour into everything. So fluoride is just a cop out for our issue with our food system and big food and the big sugar industry.”

Dr. Whitman explained she’s not necessarily anti-topical fluoride, and pointed to the widespread availability of fluoridated toothpaste as further evidence for the unnecessary nature of water fluoridation. But she also recommended hydroxyapatite, a calcium and phosphorus based teeth cleaner that is used in Italy, Japan and other western European countries, as a fluoride alternative.

Our teeth, Dr. Whitman explained, are comprised of hydroxyapatite, not fluoride. The use of the alternative can prevent the development of dental fluorosis, which affects 40 percent of teenagers in America today, according to the CDC.

It can also prevent the much more serious skeletal fluorosis, which can severely distort a person’s bones. While communities across the United States add fluoride to their water supplies, governments in India and China and other communities with high natural levels of fluoride have spent millions of dollars on research and removal efforts, Cooper told the Caller.

“The government and many nonprofits have been working for decades to solve that problem. It’s just, it’s just really difficult, and it’s difficult to filter out, and that’s why we get to this point here in the United States where … we voluntarily add it, we self-inflict this harm,” he said.

Both Cooper and Dr. Whitman pointed to the embedded nature of the mineral in standard dental practices as a barrier to change the public perception on its potential harms.

“I don’t think there’s a nefarious action. I think most dentists just don’t know the issue very well,” Cooper said. “When I talk to them at city halls and I talk to them at legislative hearings, the average dentist has been working with topical fluoride their whole life in their dental office. They learned one day in dental school, they heard about the benefits of water fluoridation as settled science, and they believe it, and they care about children.”

Still, he said, the American Dental Association, who publicly endorse water fluoridation, are too deep in defending the practice to change course.

“At this point, it’s a lie that’s too big to fail,” he said. “If they now admit that they were not only wrong, but that many millions of children were harmed by this, there would be a grand loss of trust in the American Dental Association. And unfortunately along the way, as the dental lobby is really wealthy and powerful, they co-opted government in support of this.”

Both experts argued the burden of proof should be on the pro-fluoride side, especially considering the high stakes surrounding neurodevelopment.

“I am trained as a dentist to fix teeth, but I can’t fix a brain,” Dr. Staci said. “We only have one shot at developing a child’s brain.”

Cooper concurred.

“The cavity can easily be filled, but damage to the brain is permanent and has lifelong consequences. There are no second chances with brain development, and we have a large volume of government-funded research that now shows that fluoride at the levels experienced in Florida communities is neurotoxic. That’s the scientific consensus. There is no contradictory science. And we have government-funded research showing that for decades, and they knew it, we have been overexposing infants to water fluoridation,” he concluded.

The American Dental Association, in fact, receives millions of dollars from corporations that produce fluoride products, an ADA memo requested by Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley in 2010 revealed.

“These dental product companies were giving different grants … but they were also giving millions of dollars to pay for the ADA’s endorsement of their products,” Cooper said. “You see that ADA seal of approval? Well, the one rule the ADA has to get that seal of approval is your product must contain fluoride. So even if you make a really great Xylitol toothpaste, they’re not going to put their stamp of approval unless you also add fluoride.”

Cooper lauded the Trump administration and Kennedy Jr. for taking action and drawing publicity to the issue.

“What the Trump administration is doing, what RFK is doing is on water fluoridation, is common sense that elected officials ought to be doing at every level,” he said.

Now, some public health officials are following Trump and Kennedy’s lead.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s Surgeon General, officially recommended against community water fluoridation last month, citing “the neuropsychiatric risk associated with fluoride exposure.”

Adding fluoride to water increases the risk of neuropsychiatric disease in children and reduces their IQ. We can strengthen teeth without consuming this neurotoxin.

The data are consistent, adding fluoride to our communities’ water must stop.

See my guidance here:… pic.twitter.com/KCQegirMfZ

— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) November 22, 2024

His recommendation follows a landmark September decision from United States District Judge Edward Chen in Northern California forcing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to more strictly regulate the levels of fluoride in water under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

“The scientific literature in the record provides a high level of certainty that a hazard is present; fluoride is associated with reduced IQ,” Chen, an Obama appointee, wrote in his decision.

Still, some communities, like Buffalo, New York, are doubling down. Nine years after removing the mineral from their water supply, Buffalo began fluoridating again in September.

Others still express doubt that the studies showing high levels of fluoride linked to neurotoxicity are in any way relevant to the levels at which American water is fluoridated.

“Fluoride can certainly be toxic,” Dr. Ryan Marino, a board-certified toxicologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told the Caller.

“Acute fluoride toxicity is one of the worst poisonings I can think of. However, the levels of fluoride used for dental health benefits in American drinking water are significantly below the levels that could even start to cause harmful effects and toxicity, and the levels we use have never been shown to cause harmful effects or toxicity,” Dr. Marino concluded.

But given the recent California ruling and Kennedy Jr.’s anti-fluoride campaign, Cooper is hopeful the tide is turning.

“There’s decades of science that we’ve been doing our best to get out there, but it’s been stifled by mainstream media and the ADA,” Cooper said. “Finally, now they can’t keep the lid on it anymore, and it’s just like they don’t know what to do. They’re in a panic.”

The Daily Caller contacted the CDC, the ADA, the NTP, HHS and Dr. Syra Madad for comment but did not hear back by publication.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Globalist Sociopaths Have Not Surrendered, They Have Merely Switched Sides thumbnail

The Globalist Sociopaths Have Not Surrendered, They Have Merely Switched Sides

By Leo Hohmann

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I am so grateful for all of you.

Let’s continue to live free and refuse to comply with any of the myriad schemes to control our lives through deceptive, techno-invasive applications. I believe we are on the cusp of a technocratic takeover that will see more draconian measures in 2025 and eventually lead us straight into the global surveillance state.

Because of the election of Trump, many will let their guard down and believe that Trump is going to fix all of America’s and the world’s problems. Problems of war, crime, failing economies, energy availability, and the immigration nightmares.

That would be a mistake. Those who make up the brains behind the politicians have not surrendered to Donald Trump and the conservatives. They have simply changed sides. They have the same agenda. They will just go about implementing it a bit differently, using people on the “right” instead of those on the “left” to bring in the same agenda of greater human control.

The time to oppose these measures is now.

Anything that can be weaponized for the digital reset must be rejected hard and fast. This includes digital currencies and digital IDs that will likely sneak in the back door under the guise of “voter ID,” but it also includes electric cars, smart homes, smart appliances, smart cities, etc. It’s all one big data-gathering operation. Pay with cash when possible because they want to replace it with digital, programmable tokens that can be turned on and off based on a social credit score that measures your compliance with the anti-human globalist agenda.

If you like meat, eat real meat. Eat real eggs and real butter, not the ultra-processed imitations of these God-given whole foods. If you like milk, drink real milk. Thank God for all of the real food to which we still have access.

Do not comply with any of the demands being made by globalist elitist freaks seeking to change your behavior. Creeps like John Kerry. Unfortunately, we cannot dismiss the maniacal rants like the one by Kerry in the video below as just the insane musings of a madman. We cannot dismiss or ignore these freaks because they control so much of our economy, our culture, our education and healthcare systems, even our military. We saw how roughly 98 percent of the doctors jumped to obey these sociopathic killers during Covid, prescribing unproven medical measures and pushing them as if they were life-saving when in fact they were life-threatening and life-destroying.

The West is full of multi-millionaires and billionaires just like the corrupt John Kerry. NATO is the military arm of these globalist control freaks and there is nothing they’d like more right now than to get World War III off the ground in 2025.

This great war will be phase two of the great culling that’s been years in the making. I believe 2025 is the year they’d like to launch the kinetic phase of World War III (the information-war phase has been ongoing for decades and intensified in 2020). Phase one included a lab-created pandemic and mRNA injections backed by psychological warfare on the masses, and phase two is global kinetic war. Phase three will be famine and starvation. When it’s all over, we’ll know why the 2014 Deagle Report forecasted a U.S. population of nearly 70 percent fewer people. I don’t necessarily agree with Deagle’s timing, by the end of 2025, but those forecasted benchmarks will be reached, probably by 2030.

With that in mind, watch the angry climate huckster John Kerry scolding us to “behave,” which means we should agree to lower our already disintegrating midde-class standard of living, while he and his billionaire buddies flit around in their private jets and dine on the finest fillets.

WATCH: Globalist John Kerry: “We need to get people to behave!”

It’s in this same spirit of satanic hatred for human life that the CDC just issued its 2025 childhood vaccine schedule. It includes five “routine” injections during pregnancy, more than 70 “routine” childhood injections from birth to age 18, and another 130 injections for adults up to age 79. I guess they figure if you make it to 79 you’re so tough they can’t kill you so why waste anymore of their precious toxic serums on you!

Notice where Kerry was speaking at in the above video. Harvard.

Everything that comes out of these putrid institutions and their globalist puppet mouthpieces is geared toward hastening our death, starting from children in the womb and ending with the elderly and infirm. And it’s working. The life expectancy of the average American citizen has been in free fall for the past decade. Almost nobody wants to talk about it. Even fewer want to honestly investigate it. Countries around the world are reporting much higher excess death rates since 2021. Those death rates should have gone down with the release of their “miracle vaccine” but they’ve ratcheted up by 20 to 40 percent in most industrialized countries and the harder the country pushed the shots, the higher their excess death rate. Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Research Safety Foundation, has done the research on this. It’s not conspiracy. It’s fact. The establishment gatekeepers have no logical or provable answer for why this is happening and they refuse to address the elephant in the room.

The elites who populate our Western establishment institutions have lost the public’s trust, and I think they know it. That makes them more dangerous than ever.

My motto has served me well over the years. Question everything. Whether the information is coming from a doctor, a politician, a journalist, or a business or tech leader, question it. Do your own research, especially when it involves the lives of your kids or grandkids.

And don’t think Donald Trump is going to save us from this death cult.

Catherine Austin Fitts tried to explain this to interviewer Greg Hunter about a year ago. Greg, like so many others, just couldn’t accept the truth about Trump. That’s what makes you a sycophant. You cannot believe your leader could ever be led down the wrong path, at least not routinely and surely not knowingly. Watch C.A.F.’s brilliant deconstruction of Hunter’s misplaced assumptions.

Even the arch liberal tech baron Mark Zuckerberg has descended on Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring. He sees other giants of the tech world rubbing shoulders with the incoming president, men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and he doesn’t want to be left on the outside.

If it was Trump’s intention to dismantle the weaponized bio-pharma-security complex, he would not have surrounded himself in his second term with so many members of the death cult. More on that in the video below.

©2024 . All rights reserved.


Please visit LeoHohmann.com. Investigative reporting on globalism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and where politics, culture and religion intersect.

The Trump Counterrevolution Is a Return to Sanity thumbnail

The Trump Counterrevolution Is a Return to Sanity

By Victor Davis Hanson

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after President Donald Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51% of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

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Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

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The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.

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President Joe Biden was really suffering from dementia, not those who said he was.

Criminals with weapons are as deleterious to society as law-abiding citizens deprived of them.

It is not a thought crime to believe there are two sexes—not three or four or more. No one should be forced to buy an electric vehicle, disconnect their natural gas stove, or submit to racial or gender indoctrination sessions.

Americans should speak their minds and write what they wish without worry of being censored, blacklisted, ostracized, doxxed, or shadow-banned—or jailed.

Campuses are not oases of tolerance, disinterested inquiry, and free expression. They instead increasingly became overpriced indoctrination centers that shred the Constitution and graduate indebted students who know less—but are far more biased—than when they enrolled.

Trump and his MAGA appointees promise to slash over a trillion dollars from the annual federal budget, disbanding entire agencies.

Is the objection that an ever-expanding government—$37 trillion in debt, running nearly $2 trillion in annual deficits—should keep growing?

Trump pledges to reform the Pentagon—ending DEI Pentagon commissars and revolving-door corporate generalship.

He vows to hold the 4-star class responsible for the catastrophe in Afghanistan and to reenlist soldiers who were driven out due to draconian vaccination mandates or woke intolerance. Trump envisions changing the entire system of military procurement.

Does the status quo object on the grounds that our military leadership has been winning our wars abroad?

Is the Pentagon currently awash in eager recruits?

Has it stockpiled a huge surplus of shells, bombs, and rockets?

Trump promises historic deportations of the 12 million who destroyed the southern border and surged in without health or criminal audits.

Trump vows to rescue swamped social services and stop crimes by illegal alien felons.

Is that really worse than the Biden administration’s original massive importation of millions of illegal aliens, empowered by drug-importing and sex-trafficking cartels?

Who are the culpable? Those flagrantly mocking and breaking the law, or those vowing to enforce it?

Trump says he will deter enemies without bogging America down in “endless wars”—and did just that in his first four years as president.

Is the current alternative preferable to convincing enemies that there are few consequences to their aggression, sandbagging allies like Israel, or feeding the war in Ukraine without any plan of either winning or ending it?

The Trump revolution is also cultural and social. Shared class interests have replaced race, ethnicity, and gender chauvinism.

Athletes of all races are no longer taking a knee in protest of America’s supposed systemic racism during the national anthem. Sometimes they celebrate their scoring by doing honorific Trump YMCA/golf-swing dances on national television.

Enlistments to help craft the Trump counterrevolution are not always predicated on degrees, conventional resumes, or past lengthy government service. Race and gender do not determine qualifications alone. Nor does class.

Common sense, successful lives outside of government, and a desire to end the current nonsense count instead as better prerequisites.

For Trump, party identification, titles, and traditional prestige matter less as he is surrounded by an ideologically diverse cadre, including Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dana White, Tulsi Gabbard, and Joe Rogan.

The country no longer must apologize incessantly for its past or present but can move on—content that it need not be perfect to be better than all the alternatives.

The age of flashing pronouns, renaming iconic landmarks, statue toppling, trashing the dead, vandalizing with impunity the campus library, or spouting antisemitic venom is passing.

So, another name for the Trump counterrevolution is a simple return to sanity.

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

VIDEO: A Veteran Journalist Details the Nature of Scientific American that Once August Magazine thumbnail

VIDEO: A Veteran Journalist Details the Nature of Scientific American that Once August Magazine

By Vlad Tepes Blog

This is an interesting and at times amusing look at how a benchmark magazine of science and reason has become a vector for dialectical narrative enforcement.

Some of the examples he offers could be seen as amusing, if it wasn’t for the red zone level of danger to America and the West that it represents.

Much like how medical journals such as the Lancet are partially responsible for the deaths of everyone denied HCQ or who didn’t take it when available when it may have saved their lives during Covid, because of their fraudulent article detailing its dangers and ineffectiveness.

WATCH: The Scientific American Goes Woke + Laura Helmuth’s Resignation by Michael Shermer

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by  is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Let’s Say Man IS Changing the Climate. So What? thumbnail

Let’s Say Man IS Changing the Climate. So What?

By Selwyn Duke

“The temperature is rising!” “The temperature is dropping.” The temperature is staying the same.”

We argue the “facts” of climate change (even as parts of New Jersey were just buried under 11 inches of global warming). One side wants the facts to show that man is disrupting the climate, while the other wants them to show that he’s not. But an almost never posed question should be asked:

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that our industry is causing global warming. So what?

No, I’m not a guy who “just wants to see the world burn” (and that would be literally). Rather, if anthropogenic climate change were occurring, why should we assume it wouldn’t be beneficial?

Oh, it’s not just that the Earth is greener and crop yields are higher when CO2 levels are greater; it’s not just that relative warmth breeds life. It’s also this:

Some scientists have said the Earth will soon enter, or has already entered, a significant cooling phase. Others even contend that another ice age is nigh. And if this is so, any man-caused temperature increase would merely mitigate this naturally induced but deadly phenomenon.

One of these scientists was the late Professor S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physics expert who had been a founding director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. “I have recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the dangers they pose to humans on our planet,” he wrote in 2015 — “and indeed to most of terrestrial ecology.”

Singer explained later in his article that there “are two kinds of ice ages”:

(i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically.

(ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun.

The scientist then warned that the “current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent….”

Now, this is a frightening prospect. Even the liberal New York Times admitted in 2017, reporting on a Lancet study, that “cold weather is responsible, directly or indirectly, for 17 times as many deaths as hot weather.” That’s in our relatively warm time, too. What would happen during a major ice age?

Well, “The coolings are quite severe,” informed Singer. “[T]he most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of (barely) surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.”

In other words, another major ice age would likely be a Hollywood-like, apocalyptic disaster. In fact, Singer insisted that we should be prepared to use scientific interventions to mitigate such an eventuality (while Bill Gates wants to do the same to cool down the Earth). To be clear, though, while Singer said that another ice age could begin tomorrow, it could also be tens of thousands of year away. And my article isn’t about hashing out the details, assessing probability, or recommending mitigation measures. (you can read Singer’s work for that). It is about this: prejudice.

Again, accepting for argument that man is significantly warming the planet (not my belief), why assume this is bad?

In reality, moderns’ thinking so often reflects a kind of misanthropism or, at least, a bias against Western-triumph-born modernity. People believing that extraterrestrials furtively visit our planet never assume the aliens’ matter-of-course environmental impact could be malign; they’re too advanced. People pondering a hunter-gatherer tribe (e.g., the North Sentinelese) generally assume they just must live “in harmony with nature” and be innocuous; they’re too primitive. Never mind that American Indians deforested stretches along, and caused the sedimentation of, the Delaware River long before Europeans’ New World arrival (to provide just one perspective-lending example). The activities of man, or modern man or Western man, depending on the precise prejudice, just must be harmful for the simple reason that he engaged in them. So, yes, racial profiling is a problem — against the human race.

In fairness, we can do and have done much to damage the environment. In fairness again, though, forested area in the U.S. is greater than it was a century back and our water and air are cleaner than they were 60 years ago. And in recent times the Great Barrier Reef has actually increased in size (this isn’t necessarily due to man’s activities). So we can also be good shepherds of the Earth.

The odd thing, though, about the misanthropic prejudice is that implicit in it is an idea that man is akin to some unnatural, artificial presence. This, coming from people who generally also believe man is himself only an animal, a mere product of evolution; in other words, just another part of nature. And, of course, whether the result of divine creation or evolutionary happenstance, part of nature (or Creation) is precisely what man is.

As for the world’s fortunes, 99.9 percent of the species of life that have ever existed are extinct, partially due to ice ages. So ironically, if man’s activities — either accidentally, intentionally or both — mitigate the coming ice age, we humans may be responsible for counteracting the next great extinction.

©2024 . All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: COP FLOP: UN COP29 climate summit faces ‘Trump Effect’


Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on X (formerly Twitter), MeWe or Gettr or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

COP FLOP: UN COP29 climate summit faces ‘Trump Effect’ – UN advisors label summit ‘meaningless ritual’ – Climate grifters unhappy with $300 billion a year pledges thumbnail

COP FLOP: UN COP29 climate summit faces ‘Trump Effect’ – UN advisors label summit ‘meaningless ritual’ – Climate grifters unhappy with $300 billion a year pledges

By Marc Morano from Climate Depot

AWED MEDIA BALANCE NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections thumbnail

AWED MEDIA BALANCE NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections

By John Droz, Jr.

Welcome! We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Here is the link for this issue, so please share it on social media.

Checkout the 2024, 2023, & 2022 archives, plus asterisked items below.


— This Newsletter’s Articles, by Topic —

If You Only Have Time to Read Some Select Articles:

*** Critically Thinking about Children’s Books — What’s in Your School? (Part 1)

*** America First vs. America Last Report Card: K-12 Mathematics Achievement

*** A New Way to Educate K-12 Students

*** UN Plots Changes to Standardized Tests to “Green” Education Globally

*** Make Education Great Again!

*** Schoolhouse Limbo: How Low Will Educators Go to ‘Better’ Grades?

*** Comparing the Pollsters’ Presidential Predictions

*** Suing Election Officials Proves Effective

*** President-elect Trump’s bold plan to dismantle the Deep State and return power to the people

*** No, Joe. This is no peaceful transfer of power

*** RFK Jr. tapped to lead Department of Health and Human Services

*** Trump taps former WWE CEO Linda McMahon to serve as education secretary

*** Musk & Vivek Targeting Government Waste

*** Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

*** Ramaswamy says some federal agencies will be ‘deleted outright’ by DOGE with ‘mass reductions’ on tap

*** The Plot to Manage Democracy

*** Federal court upends decades of environmental regulations

*** How Helene Gave Way to ‘Hurricane Snafu’ in the Carolinas

*** The American Library Association is Queering the Catalog

*** Trump: ‘Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country’

*** Science Shock: U.K. Met Office is “Inventing” Temperature Data from 100 Non-Existent Stations

*** How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When We Can’t Trust The Data?

*** Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change

*** President-Elect Trump: The final nail in the coffin of the environmental globalists?

*** Dutch appeals court overturns landmark climate ruling against Shell

*** COP29 is immoral (Alex Epstein)

*** The injustice of climate reparations

*** 3 undeniable facts about climate for #COP29

*** BRICS’ Kazan Declaration Trumps COP29 Climate Blather

*** Inaudible Infrasound from Wind Turbines Disturbs Health of Humans and ALL Organisms

*** Red Power

*** Ten Climate/Energy Action Items Trump Should Take On

*** Chris Wright, An Unapologetic Energy Humanist, Will Be The Next Secretary Of Energy

*** Chris Wright: An Energy Secretary Nominee Who Actually Knows Energy

*** Why I strongly support Chris Wright for Secretary of Energy — Epstein

*** Whistleblow Uncovers Covid Scam (Germany)

*** Now it can be told: the truth about the Covid jabs is slowly coming out

*** Nature paper shows the COVID “vaccines” increased your risk of getting COVID

*** How $190 Billion in COVID-19 Relief Spending Failed America’s Students

*** The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide

*** How Federal Funding Constrains Scientific Insight

*** Scientists Haven’t ‘Saved’ the Ozone Layer

*** Scientific American Ignored Years of Editor Laura Helmuth’s Appalling Conduct, Then Scalped Her After I Circulated Her Own Tweets

*** Does ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care Affect IQ?

*** Top Agriculture Exec: ‘All of Canada’s Shrimp Are Injected with mRNA, America Will Follow’

Secondary Education Related:

*** Report: The Key to Fixing the US Education System

*** Critically Thinking about Children’s Books — What’s in Your School? (Part 1)

*** A New Way to Educate K-12 Students

*** America First vs. America Last Report Card: K-12 Mathematics Achievement

*** UN Plots Changes to Standardized Tests to “Green” Education Globally

*** Make Education Great Again!

*** Schoolhouse Limbo: How Low Will Educators Go to ‘Better’ Grades?

Moms for Liberty call for DOE to be ‘shut down’: ‘Put parents back in the driver’s seat’

NC Funds even more money for School Choice

Higher Education Related:

How Academic Elites Are Undoing Centuries of Progress

A New College “Racism” Study Really May Be Peak Woke

Greed Energy Economics:

Another Wind Project Surpasses $ Billion in Subsidies

The Disastrous Economics of Trying to Power an Electrical Grid with 100% Intermittent Renewables

Unreliables Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:

*** Inaudible Infrasound from Wind Turbines Disturbs Health of Humans and ALL Organisms

Wind Energy — Other:

*** Red Power

Trump must trash Biden’s radical ‘environment justice’ rules on Day 1

Misc Energy:

*** Ten Climate/Energy Action Items Trump Should Take On

*** Chris Wright, An Unapologetic Energy Humanist, Will Be The Next Secretary Of Energy

*** Chris Wright: An Energy Secretary Nominee Who Actually Knows Energy

*** Why I strongly support Chris Wright for Secretary of Energy — Epstein

Trump says Interior pick Burgum will chair new National Energy Council

Weatherizing Your Home for Winter

New Data Shows NY is Nowhere Near Its Energy Goals

Utility Companies are Run by Technocrats Obsessed with Control Over Energy

Manmade Global Warming — COP29:

*** COP29 is immoral (Alex Epstein)

*** The injustice of climate reparations

*** 3 undeniable facts about climate for #COP29

*** BRICS’ Kazan Declaration Trumps COP29 Climate Blather

Argentina walks away from COP29 – amid fears Trump may pull US out of Paris climate deal

COP29 Preview: Hot Talk vs. Reality

It’s All About the Money

Green Activists Are Coming for Your Money

Manmade Global Warming — Some Deceptions:

*** How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When We Can’t Trust The Data?

*** Science Shock: U.K. Met Office is “Inventing” Temperature Data from 100 Non-Existent Stations

*** Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change

Charitable Climate-Change Entities have Adopted Woke Attributes

Manmade Global Warming — Misc:

*** President-Elect Trump: The final nail in the coffin of the environmental globalists?

*** Dutch appeals court overturns landmark climate ruling against Shell

Let’s Make CO2 Great Again

“Hygiene Poverty”: The Brutal Reality of Life in Net Zero Britain

US Election:

*** Comparing the Pollsters’ Presidential Predictions

*** Election Integrity Going Forward

Recharging The Light Of Liberty

US Election Integrity:

*** Suing Election Officials Proves Effective

PA Democrats openly admit to counting illegal ballots in McCormick-Casey race

Democrats are now proposing a shadow government to go against President Trump

Minnesota election judge faces felony charges over accepting unregistered votes

US Election — Trump:

*** President-elect Trump’s bold plan to dismantle the Deep State and return power to the people

*** No, Joe. This is no peaceful transfer of power

Choice of globalist water boy John Thune as Senate Majority Leader a slap in the face to 73 million Trump voters

Trump’s sentencing is canceled. Will reality ever take a bite out of Bragg’s outrageous case?

Progressives Insult Americans Because Trump Won

US Election — Trump’s Cabinet:

*** RFK Jr. tapped to lead Department of Health and Human Services

*** Trump taps former WWE CEO Linda McMahon to serve as education secretary

Karoline Leavitt feels well-prepared to tackle ‘hostile territory’ as White House press secretary

Who is Susie Wiles, Trump’s Chief of Staff?

US Election — Musk & Ramaswamy:

*** Musk & Vivek Targeting Government Waste

*** Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

*** Ramaswamy says some federal agencies will be ‘deleted outright’ by DOGE with ‘mass reductions’ on tap

Pentagon holds briefing as dept fails to explain where $824 billion went

Misc US Politics:

*** The Plot to Manage Democracy

*** Federal court upends decades of environmental regulations

*** How Helene Gave Way to ‘Hurricane Snafu’ in the Carolinas

General Flynn: Democrats Must Remove President Biden Now

The UK’s Soviet Justice System

5,800 IRS Agents and Contractor Employees Owe Over $546 Million in Unpaid Taxes

Societally US:

*** The American Library Association is Queering the Catalog

Reality Wins: Transwomen Are Men

Religion Related:

*** Trump: ‘Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country’

Pope Francis rejects tradition, opts for wooden casket and burial outside Vatican

Science:

*** How Federal Funding Constrains Scientific Insight

*** Scientists Haven’t ‘Saved’ the Ozone Layer

*** Scientific American Ignored Years of Editor Laura Helmuth’s Appalling Conduct, Then Scalped Her After I Circulated Her Own Tweets

Health:

*** Does ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care Affect IQ?

*** Top Agriculture Exec: ‘All of Canada’s Shrimp Are Injected with mRNA, America Will Follow’

Survey Study Shows How to Reduce Family Physician Burnout

COVID-19 — Misc:

*** Whistleblow Uncovers Covid Scam (Germany)

*** Now it can be told: the truth about the Covid jabs is slowly coming out

*** Nature paper shows the COVID “vaccines” increased your risk of getting COVID

*** How $190 Billion in COVID-19 Relief Spending Failed America’s Students

*** The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide

Medical Journal Censorship is the Proximate Cause of the Covid Vaccine Catastrophe

Catholic woman fired for refusing COVID vaccine wins over $12M in Michigan court

Israel/Ukraine:

Pray for the safety of the Israeli people

Latest Developments in Israel

Pray for the safety of the Ukrainian people

A well-rated source to make a Ukraine donation


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Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g., PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.

Note 2: For past Newsletter issues see the archives from 2021, 2022, 2023, & 2024. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over all fourteen plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put this together — where you can search ALL prior issues, by year. For a background about how the Newsletter is put together, etc., please read this.

Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.

Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or any of my websites) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.

Copyright © 2024; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org).

How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat from the Federal Budget thumbnail

How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat from the Federal Budget

By David Stockman

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to the DOGE of Musk and Ramaswamy. In spades!

For want of doubt, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $1 trillion.

By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion. And under current built-in spending and tax policies it will hit $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window.

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Thereafter, however, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!

Of course, long before the public debt actually hits $150 trillion or 166% of GDP per the CBO’s current long-term projection, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So we need to be clear that the team of Musk and Ramaswamy is talking about savings of $2 trillion per year and relatively soon, too. We make this clarification because we see the usual clueless commentators on Bubblevision saying, “Oh, they must be talking about $2 trillion over 10 years or at least a multi-year period of time.”

But we don’t think they meant that at all because Elon’s statement on the matter at the Madison Square Garden rally was very clear, and, quite frankly, if realized over 10 years or even 5 years it would be hardly worth the bother. That’s because the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine will be accumulating interest expense so fast as to make $2 trillion of savings spread over a decade little more than a rounding error. To wit, Federal interest expense has already passed the $1 trillion per year mark, which figure will hit $1.7 trillion by 2034 according to CBO and would top $7.5 trillion per year at minimum by our calculations by mid-century.

That is, if something drastic is not done now—like a $2 trillion annual budget savings soon—America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of the Federal budget—Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, interest, and the Washington Monument—today.

So, yes, Musk surely did mean $2 trillion per year in this interchange:

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“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion (annual) Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk at the former president’s recent rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. 

Without offering specifics, Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” in a brief moment that has since gained widespread attention online and drawn mixed reactions from budget world.

Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entire planet this year.

So based on experience we suggest building the $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by type. The latter can then be used to build a detailed but comprehensible plan for arraying and conveying the desperately needed house-cleaning of the Federal budget.

In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.

We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:

  • Slash the Fat…by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful agencies and bureaucrats wholesale.
  • Downsize the Muscle…by curtailing national security capacities and functions not needed for an America First policy.
  • Cut the Bone…by reducing low-priority entitlements and subsidies that the nation cannot afford, and which a reasonable view of societal equity does not require.

Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.

To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in several subsequent installments.

  • Slash the Fat: $300 billion or 15%.
  • Downsize the Muscle: $500 billion or 25%.
  • Cut the Bone: $1.2 trillion or 60%.

Suffice here to say that even the first bucket would leave them screaming to high heaven in the Swamplands of DC. But even that $300 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating entirely the estimated $50 billion annual cost of Biden’s misguided Green New Deal, including all EV credits and subsidies, and $150 billion per year of other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.

We will amplify the details of this $200 billion of inherent fat and waste in Part 2. But suffice it here to say that attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.

For instance, the savings from eliminating “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Business on NIH’s Monkey Island” from the list below would amount to just 0.002% of the $2 trillion target, while eliminating the “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism” would save just o.0003% of the target.

Even some of the larger ideas of this sort, such as more timely elimination of dead people from the Social Security rolls, would not get you very far, either. That’s because 1.1 million Social Security recipients pass on their rewards each year, and departing beneficiaries would be receiving an average benefit currently of $1,907 per month. So one month of dead people on the rolls costs the not inconsiderable sum of $2.1 billion.

At the present time, however, that does not actually happen. The rolls are purged every month based on newly filed death certificates, and this encompasses the termination of payments to anyone who died during the month, including the last day. So the average duration on the rolls of Social Security decedents is 15 days, which computes to $1.050 billion of payments.

Thus, the average duration of dead people on the rolls might well be cut by two-thirds if the Musk and Ramaswamy team could come up with some more efficient software to monitor, report, recalculate last month’s benefits, and then terminate decedents. In turn, that means getting the dead people off Social Security 10 days faster would amount to a savings of $700 million per year or about 0.04% of the $2 trillion target. That is to say, there is undoubtedly room for efficiency improvements and elimination of outright waste and stupidity everywhere in the Federal budget, but it unfortunately adds up to rounding errors.

Stated differently, if it doesn’t “scream and bleed” politically it won’t likely make a dent in achieving the $2 trillion goal. There is just plain nothing antiseptic about slashing the Federal budget.

In this regard, it would take an average 47% cut in the current nondefense Federal headcounts of 1.343 million, including the elimination of a dozen or more agencies entirely, to achieve the balance of $100 billion of savings in the Slash the Fat category.

And that’s a comprehensive figure based on an average cost per Federal employee of $100,000 in pay per year plus $44,000 in average benefits and fringes—escalated to $160,000 per bureaucrat by FY 2029. In Part 2, we will lay out the most plausible and judicious route to the Slash the Fat category with respect to both $200 billion of corporate welfare and Green New Deal waste and $100 billion of excess nondefense payroll.

Then in Part 3, we will lay out how to cut $500 billion per year of unneeded muscle from the national security budget, followed by $1.2 trillion per year of bone from the entitlement and domestic welfare basket.

*****

This article was published by The Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Three GOP-backed candidates sweep open seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission thumbnail

Three GOP-backed candidates sweep open seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission

By Madeline Armstrong

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: Among other bright spots in the last election is Republican control of the Corporation Commission. This is very important for the future of the state. Voters want cheap and reliable energy and not follow the course of California.

Eight candidates competed for the three open seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission – three were registered Republicans in the race, three were Democrats and two were affiliated with the Green Party.

All three of those candidates endorsed by Arizona’s Republican party claimed the available seats with Rachel Walden receiving 17.89% of the votes, Rene Lopez receiving 17.37% and Incumbent Lea Marquez Peterson receiving 16.89% at 99% of precincts reporting.

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“It is a great honor to be elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission,” reads a post by Walden on X. “Thank you to all of the volunteers who knocked on doors, made calls on my behalf, and put up signs. I am so grateful for all of the grassroots efforts. But I am especially grateful for the hundreds of thousands of votes. Thank you for trusting me to serve on the Arizona Corporation Commission. I look forward to serving you to make sure our utilities are affordable and reliable.”

Incumbent Ylenia Aguilar was not able to retain her seat on the commission.

“While the outcome wasn’t what we hoped, I’m grateful to all the volunteers who helped shape this campaign,” Aguilar said. “It’s been an honor running [for] state office, meeting so many wonderful people, and visiting communities across our beautiful state. I will always advocate [for] the people of AZ.”

The ACC race has been scrutinized this year after Arizona saw one of its hottest summers in history resulting in energy price rate hikes. Some Arizona residents saw their energy bills increase by up to $100 a month.

According to a study conducted by Texas Electricity Ratings, Arizona is among the top ten states to see energy price increases with an estimate of $2,190.60 per household in 2024. The Democratic-backed candidates claimed that this was due to the current commission which has historically been led by registered Republicans. While prices did increase in recent years, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration places Arizona near the national average in monthly electric bills per household. 

In 2023, the ACC approved numerous energy rate hikes, which Petersen said were necessary and fair. These increases include a 9.31% revenue hike for Southwest Gas, a 153% hike for APS fuel reimbursements, a PSA rate increase that is expected to add almost $10 to users’ monthly bills and a rate increase for Southwest Gas that would allow it to recoup an “under-collected” amount of $357 million.

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“We’re all being hit by inflation, but a lot of our utilities have been dragging these expenses around for years,” Walden said during a debate hosted by the Arizona Clean Elections Commission. “Now it’s time to pay the bill.”

However, Joshua Polacheck, who only received 14.44% of the votes, claimed that utility companies are also seeing record profits.

“We should not be seeing record profits with our utilities while we’re seeing record prices every month with our electricity and gas bills,” Polacheck said.

Something Democrats across the state have been advocating for that they believe would help lower costs is shifting towards renewable energy sources.

“Right now it is cheaper to be building clean energy in our state, but instead we are providing perverse incentives to the utilities to be building infrastructure that we don’t need and getting in the way of our clean energy future,” Polacheck said. “There is a possibility of letting the market go free and I can’t believe I’m saying this as a Democrat, but the Republicans on this stage are getting in the way of the free market when it comes to energy.”

Polacheck also cited during his campaign the recent complaints from Mohave County residents following the approval of four new energy turbines being built near Kingman – and the ACC allowing them to do so without the typically necessary requirement of a certification of environmental compatibility.

The three candidates that will be joining the commission have all agreed on their main purpose which is to protect Arizona ratepayers and keep energy costs fair in Arizona.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and has been reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

President Trump Announces Doug Burgum Will Lead the NEW “National Energy Council” thumbnail

President Trump Announces Doug Burgum Will Lead the NEW “National Energy Council”

By The Geller Report

Energy independence is back!

This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape.

President Trump just announced the forming of a new council called the National Energy Council to propel the nation into energy dominance. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum will lead it.

“It will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation of ALL forms of American Energy. This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”

WATCH: President Trump forms National Energy Council to propel the nation into energy dominance

‘Drill, drill, drill’: New energy council signals Trump to prioritize energy production

By:  – November 16, 2024 

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Friday afternoon that his pick for Interior secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, would also coordinate a new council on energy policy is a sign the incoming administration will make energy production a core part of its domestic policy.

Few details of the new National Energy Council were available Friday, as activists and lawmakers processed the surprise 4 p.m. Eastern announcement. But the move likely reflects a focus by Trump and his next administration on energy production, including fossil fuels.

“They’re signaling ahead of time that this is one of their priority areas,” Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the energy-focused law and lobbyist firm Bracewell LLP, said in an interview.

Burgum “will be joining my Administration as both Secretary of the Interior and, as Chairman of the newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy,” a written statement from Trump said.

“This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”

Trump said the council’s objective to increase U.S. energy supply would benefit the domestic economy and allies overseas and help power “A.I. superiority.”

“The National Energy Council will foster an unprecedented level of coordination among federal agencies to advance American energy,” Burgum said in a written statement. “By establishing U.S. energy dominance, we can jumpstart our economy, drive down costs for consumers and generate billions in revenue to help reduce our deficit.”

It was unclear what the role of the Department of Energy would be in such an arrangement. The current secretary in the Biden administration is Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan.

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Does Trump signal the end of climate change extravaganzas? thumbnail

Does Trump signal the end of climate change extravaganzas?

By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense

NEWS FLASH: John Robson, of the Climate Discussion Nexus, reports from Baku about COP29.


The 29th UN climate conference convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 11 under something of a cloud. Or rather a pile-up of incoming storm fronts. There were a lot of reasons for delegates to arrive pre-discouraged. And then came the Trump of Doom. Or a peculiar orange formation mistaken for same.

I haven’t actually heard a whole lot of detailed references to the outcome of the American election, which not only put someone openly contemptuous of climate alarmism into the White House but also gave his party control of both houses of Congress. But it’s not as though people didn’t notice. Thus American marquee New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells, who I believe is absent physically but is certainly present ideologically, just wrote bitterly:

“Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster.”

That he then whistled a happy “global renewables boom” tune that couldn’t change the mood. Not least because his own publication’s “Climate Forward” promptly emailed about “Trump’s potential threat to weather data”.

Canada’s “The Hub” chimed in with a typical Canadian perspective, aka something nobody outside Canada cares about at all: “There’s no reason for Trump to put the brakes on Canada’s low-carbon economic growth”. Nor indeed any reason for anyone to care, given our trivial contribution to supposedly planet-roasting “carbon pollution” despite our outsized contribution to sanctimony on the subject.

The strange thing is that Wallace-Wells did have a point, accidentally. It is true that Trump cannot stop America’s renewables boom, or for that matter Canada’s low-carbon economic growth, because neither is happening anyway. And more broadly, Trump can’t derail the COP agenda because it’s already off the bridge and smouldering in broken chunks in the river below.

Petrostate hospitality

As delegates here must be dimly aware, this conference is problematic in many ways. Including being hosted, for the second straight year, by a petrostate. Azerbaijan cannot really be called democratic, except by regime propagandists and I’m not sure how much they bother. (In case you all aren’t from around there, it’s an hereditary dictatorship whose late president Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, had been the local Soviet party boss from 1969 to 1983. He rose to that position via a KGB career that saw him reach the Politburo, before falling out with Gorbachev, being “retired”, then becoming president of Azerbaijan in a military coup in 1993. That it is ruled by the New Azerbaijan Party should not mislead you. But I digress.

The key point is that Azerbaijan is a poor country with a messy history and a lot of problems and one big hope: the energy industry. It accounts for about a third of the entire economy and 90 percent of exports, and they can’t just chuck it into the Caspian Sea and go back to living on salt.

In fact, speaking of the Caspian Sea, it’s in terrible condition ecologically. And as with things like having enough food, potable water, sewers, the ability to defend the nation’s borders in a rough neighbourhood, the idea of cleaning up the Caspian relies on generating a lot more wealth than they currently have. And while the government does hope to foster the tourist industry, an aspiration dealt a harsh blow by COVID, the truth is that Azerbaijan is hard to get to and there aren’t a lot of obvious reasons to come here on vacation.

They do have half the world’s active mud volcanoes, which is kind of cool. And also the Gobustan Petroglyphswhich were also. We went and saw both. But it’s no substitute for being the world’s 21st largest oil exporter, into a pipeline through Georgia and Turkey (I told you it was a tough neighbourhood) into Europe.

Azerbaijan is not alone, of course, in being dependent on hydrocarbon energy. Essentially the whole world is. But where many nations are dependent primarily as consumers, no small matter, some are also dependent as producers. And as the current president Ilhan Aliyev pointedly informed delegates, his government wasn’t about to ditch their key industry.

I could get off on a tangent about the challenges of “modernization”, which is actually and crucially Westernization, in a place with Azerbaijan’s history including forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1991 after previous forcible incorporation into the Russian Empire and a lot of other seedy ventures before that. They promptly introduced a modified Latin alphabet and phased out the Cyrillic one, though the replacement has 32 letters, about half of which are not pronounced the way we would.

Oh, and the roads are littered with Ladas, sometimes literally, though also in Baku at least you also see a lot of modern cars made everywhere but here. Likewise the name for car, “Avto”, was made in… Russia. Not a good sign.

There. I did get off on a tangent. But not entirely or I would have edited it out. It’s pertinent because the challenges facing anyone trying to create a decent life for the inhabitants of Azerbaijan are enormous (and arguably include its current government). But they would certainly get worse, even catastrophically so, if the economic lifeline were cut. Which brings me back to Donald Trump who, I’m told, is surprisingly popular here among people who have any idea who he is.

A key reason why the second election of Trump is so big delegates can’t cope with it is this. It’s not just that Orange Man Bad, or anti-Americanism, is one of the forms of hatred not merely permitted but encouraged in our modern, tolerant, diverse, equitably bitter world. It’s that the return of Trump, warts and all, is part of a much larger reaction that threatens the COP agenda and much more besides.

For all his flaws, he represents an overdue and necessary backlash of ordinary people against presumptuous elites who despise them and their lives and would casually wreck them, from COVID lockdowns to Net Zero. And whatever else comes along. And the COP delegates here, I think, dimly sense that it’s a powerful force. Only dimly, because they live in an intellectual as well as sociological bubble.

Copping it sweet

Despite the lack of mental diversity or real debate here, another undercurrent of gloom is that, as the name suggests, it’s the 29th such conference. And for the first seven, or even 15, it was possible to believe they really were going to produce a dramatic, rapid, workable solution to the crisis they claim is so immense and urgent that the great and good must gather every year, and often in between, to solve it for the wretched and ungrateful proles on expense accounts funded by same.

But somewhere around COP27 it dawned on a lot of them that they could not remake the world economy to run on wind, solar, unicorns or empty promises. So they switched to this notion that what the Soviets used to call the First World (and the smart set happily went along it), was going to give not billions but trillions of dollars to the “Third World” every year to deal with the effects of bad weather we allegedly caused by driving cars in 1972 or something.

What exactly the 50,000 or so people who have descended on Baku in the largest tourist incursion in its history make of all these considerations is unclear. I do not think 100 of them left the “Galactic metropolis” bubble of airport, taxi, hotel, taxi, conference centre, taxi, hotel, taxi and airport to see the country. It is in one sense a cosmopolitan gathering, with delegates from Scotland to Burkina Faso to Timor Leste to Kazakhstan to Indonesia.

In fact, I met one who was from Indonesia but was on the Kazakh delegation. In some sense it’s all one big if not at the moment especially happy family. And a friend back home asked me how the food was here and I responded that inside the conference centre it was quite good but exactly what you’d find anywhere in the galactic metropolis; it could as easily have been a sandwich and coffee bar in, say, Paris airport, complete with gluten-free apple cookies. They are here to save the world but not to see it or talk to it.

I do not think most of them, despite their pretensions, really know or care what life is like for the average Azerbaijani nor, crucially, what it would be like if their aspirations to “move away from fossil fuels” in short order were realized. For their information, and yours, there are just over 10 million people in this country, about a quarter of them in the greater Baku area, if that’s the right term, and Baku is basically the only metropolis. The rest live very differently, and close to the edge, though many in Baku are in straightened circumstances too.

Abandoning any realistic prospect of getting to “Net Zero” or meeting “Paris targets” or “1.5C” or any of that other insider jargon must nevertheless surely have had a depressing impact, even if many of them pretend it might still happen or at least don’t challenge the ubiquitous slogans on the walls here about it. But gathering year after year to try to extract lavish but insincere promises from First World politicians skilled at same can’t improve the mood much. And now there’s Donald Trump not just saying the whole thing is silly, but saying it on behalf of a massive constituency in America and beyond.

It’s too big and too awful to be discussed except in hushed tones or knowing asides. But yes, he has trumped their ace of conferences. And they know it.


Forward this to your friends!  


AUTHOR

John Robson

John Robson is the Executive Director of the Climate Discussion Nexus, a documentary filmmaker, a columnist with the National Post, the Epoch Times and Loonie Politics. He holds a PhD in American history from the University of Texas at Austin.

RELATED VIDEO: Oil and gas are “gift of God”, Azerbaijan leader Ilham Heydar oghlu Aliyev tells climate summit

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

AGENDA 47: The Plan to Dismantle the Deep State thumbnail

AGENDA 47: The Plan to Dismantle the Deep State

By Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.)

Agenda 47 is the 20 point plan to dismantle and destroy the deep state while at the same time rebuilding America into a free nation once again.

Agenda 47 restores and strengthens our Constitutional Republic, returns power to the people and makes Americans healthy, happy and prosperous once again.

The 20 point plan

  1. Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion
  2. Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history
  3. End inflation, and make America affordable again
  4. Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!
  5. STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
  6. Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!
  7. Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms
  8. Prevent world war three, restore peace in Europe and in the middle east, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country — all made in America
  9. End the weaponization of government against the American people
  10. Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders
  11. Rebuild our cities, including Washington D,C., making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.
  12. Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world
  13. Keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency
  14. Fight for and protect social security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age
  15. Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations
  16. Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children
  17. Keep men out of women’s sports
  18. Deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again
  19. Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship
  20. Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success

President Donald J. Trump Declares War on Cartels

Ending Veteran Homelessness in America

No Welfare for Illegal Aliens

The American Academy

President Trump’s Pledge to Homeschool Families

President Trump’s Message to America’s Auto Workers

President Trump’s Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs

America Must Have the #1 Lowest Cost Energy and Electricity on Earth

Returning Production of Essential Medicines Back to America and Ending Pharmaceutical Shortages

President Trump Calls for Death Penalty for Human Traffickers

Rescuing America’s Auto Industry from Disastrous Job-Killing Policies

Rebuilding America’s Depleted Military

Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions

Cementing Fair and Reciprocal Trade with the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act

Using Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State

Addressing Rise of Chronic Childhood Illnesses

Ending the Scourge of Drug Addiction in America

Celebration Of 250 Years Of American Independence at the Iowa State Fairgrounds

Day One Executive Order Ending Citizenship for Children of Illegals and Outlawing Birth Tourism

Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions

Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and Dangerously Deranged

Liberating America from Governmental Regulatory Onslaught

Watch more here.

The Bottom Line

We know that when President Trump makes a promise he keeps his promise. We also know that there are Democrats and some Republicans who don’t want Agenda 47 fully implemented.

We will be watching what President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance and the Trump cabinet will do to implement Agenda 47.

We will also be watching what Congress does.

We believe that it will take up to 20 years to fully implement Agenda 47. Therefore we are looking forward to POTUS 47 to get it started followed by two terms for J.D. Vance to make Agenda 47 into Agenda 48, Agenda 49 and beyond.

©2024 Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.) All rights reserved.

UN COP 29 Host Proclaims Oil and Gas ‘Gifts from God’ thumbnail

UN COP 29 Host Proclaims Oil and Gas ‘Gifts from God’

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

In a major embarrassment for the UN climate regime, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, took the stage at COP 29 and proclaimed oil and gas to be gifts from God.

Azerbaijan is the host country for this years UN climate conference.

Aliyev also denounced what he called the “fake news”  media for hypocrisy in labeling Azerbaijan a “petro state,” while the United States and Europe produce many times more oil than his nation.

WATCH: Oil and gas are “gift of God”, Azerbaijan leader Ilham Heydar oghlu Aliyev tells climate summit

You can’t make this stuff up!

In a major embarrassment for the UN climate regime the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, took the stage at COP 29 and proclaimed oil and gas to be gifts from God.

That’s not exactly how the Left’s climate narrative is supposed to go.

CFACT’s delegation is at UN COP 29, the biggest UN climate conference of the year.  Azerbaijan is this year’s host country.

Aliyev also denounced what he called the “fake news” media for hypocrisy in labeling his country a “petro state,” while the United States and Europe produce many times more oil and gas than his nation.  He also told the assembled conference delegates that Azerbaijan’s greenhouse gas emissions (if that’s your thing) are tiny when compared to other nations and the world.

The UN climate process has degenerated into farce, although it remains an incredibly expensive farce.

The Wall Street Journal called for this to be the last UN climate conference, writing that:

“The real joke of these summits is that so many people still take them seriously. Whatever one thinks of the arguments surrounding climate change, there won’t be a material reduction in global carbon emissions until China, India and other developing countries—such as, say, Azerbaijan—agree to sacrifice their economic growth on the altar of Western green fixations. This isn’t happening in practice, and Mr. Aliyev’s comments suggest leaders of those countries feel less pressure to pretend.

It makes you wonder if COP29 may be the last time anyone tries to organize a spectacle like this. The world should be so lucky.”

The UN climate regime is indeed faltering.  President Biden skipped COP 29 as did many other world leaders.

I told OAN News that, “you don’t see a Macron here, you don’t see a Justin Trudeau here, you don’t see leaders of the various western countries because they would be the ones giving out the money.  What you do see at COP 29 are leaders from a number of developing countries looking for money.”

Donald Trump’s victory poses a major challenge to the UN and the climate Left.

While there is plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects, you’d be surprised how many delegates and attendees here at COP 29 are quietly (sometimes not so quietly) cheering America on for our election results.

As I told OAN, many representatives of the developing world think it is crazy to talk about giving up private automobiles, abundant electricity and eating meat.  They want a high living standard for their countries.  They view President Trump as the leader who can restore sanity to climate and energy policy.

For nature and people too.

AUTHOR

Craig Rucker

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president. Widely heralded as a leader in the free market environmental, think tank community in Washington, D.C., Rucker is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, written extensively in numerous publications, and has appeared in such media outlets as Fox News, OANN, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, among many others.

Rucker is also the co-producer of the award-winning film Climate Hustle, which was the #1 box-office film in America during its one night showing in 2016, as well as the acclaimed Climate Hustle 2 staring Hollywood actor Kevin Sorbo released in 2020. As an accredited observer to the United Nations, Rucker has also led CFACT delegations to some 30 major UN conferences, including those in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Kyoto, Bonn, Marrakesh, Rio de Janeiro, and Warsaw, to name a few.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Morano on Fox: President Trump “will pull the UN climate agenda down” thumbnail

Morano on Fox: President Trump “will pull the UN climate agenda down”

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Marc Morano discusses COP29 and the climate agenda under the new Trump administration on Fox & Friends.

COP 29: The U.S. can finally escape the Paris Climate Accords

Consider the following

During Donald Trump’s years after he pulled us out of the Paris Accords, the global temperature had its ups and downs but was essentially level.  Look what happened.

From  a Close up of Dr Roy Spencer’s site https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

Now suppose I thought like the mainstream media does about every weather event, but wanted to make my point for my side of the issue.

Here is the headline:

Joe Biden causes a massive temperature jump once America rejoins the Paris accords.

Nothing is further from the truth. Yet if you are a warped propagandist, you can take any event and blame it on someone, in this case, I can blame it on Biden putting us back in the all pain, no gain, Paris Accords

But it would be a lie.

What is true is the Paris Accords are UNABLE TO MEANINGFULLY ALTER THE GLOBAL CLIMATE.  It’s a waste of money and  a useless feel-good exercise.

In fact, the recent jump in temperature should be a nail in the coffin of the man-made climate change pushers for it proves it has to be water vapor linked. The simple intuitive explanation: Increase the water vapor and you increase the amount of energy in the atmosphere, and heat is a measure of energy.

Let us look at water vapors in relation to the whole shooting match.

Source: https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/SCC-Koutsoyiannis-DogTail-Nov-2024.pdf

Co2 is next to nothing That means the increase in co2 has to have much less effect and is overwhelmed by clouds and water vapor. That man is only responsible for a small amount of that, and the US only about 10% of that, which makes it absurd to be dumping money and support into what is a fool’s errand.

If you simply look at Saturation mixing ratio tables ( I have shown this many times, so I am not going to go over it again), it explains not only why it would warm, but where it is warming most, in the driest coldest places. Much of the warming is in those areas during their cold seasons. Clouds have been decreasing in general across the tropics and increasing in the arctic areas, a sign of a distorted warming pattern brought about by the relationship of water vapor to temperature.

The combination of the strong El Nino and Tonga blasting the most measurable amounts of water vapor in the air led to the rise The question is why are the oceans warming and I like the hypothesis of geothermal input brought about by changes in the exosphere ( the core of the earth) reacting to the change in gravitational pull by the alignments of the planets and the sun, changing the center or the gravitational forcing. I will have an expert on my show, the Wise Guys of Weather on Am 970 the Answer, NYC 5 pm on Sundays, on this matter on Nov 24. It is mind-boggling but worth considering.

But the left in all its glory wants to scream at President-elect Trump for taking us out of the accords, which we should not be in anyway. Co’2, for whatever it may do, is dwarfed by large natural-scale forcing. And that should be clear as day given what we have just witnessed from the volcano and strong El Nino and the cumulative reaction. I have a hypothesis, that the left hates and a lot of people on my side don’t like on the geothermal spreading and the work of Dr. Arthuer Viterito jives with what this 50-year forecaster snow has observed. For whatever reason the oceans ARE WARMING but not because of what CO2 is doing. In fact, the warming oceans are likely a major contributor to the rise in CO2. If we reduced man’s CO2 input to zero on the chart above, the other drivers would simply take up whatever little effect it has.

Here is my forecast. Once President Trump stops this waste of money and pulls us out of the accords, the temperature will level off unless there is another Tongo or major El Nino. So if you try to link the warmth to man-made sources because the source of the spike has nothing to do with it, you have to be blind or brainwashed.

Or a liar.

Take your pick

In the meantime the sooner we are out of this worthless accord, the better.

AUTHOR

Joe Bastardi

Joe Bastardi is a pioneer in extreme weather and long-range forecasting. He is the author of “The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won’t Hear From Al Gore — and Others” which you can purchase at the CFACT bookstore. His new book The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war can be found here: phonyclimatewar.com

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.