General Electric’s Taxpayer-Powered Wind Machines thumbnail

General Electric’s Taxpayer-Powered Wind Machines

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By Ken Braun

Editors’ Note: This is just another example of wild spending to force change in the energy field on Americans and how badly US corporations have been corrupted by the government by the cynically named Inflation Reduction Act.

“Wind turbines are like strippers. They stop working when you stop throwing money at them.” Author unknown

The price of climate pork has shot up 2,000 percent, thanks to the ironically-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). According to a recent projection from the U.S. Treasury, American taxpayers will fork over a stunning $425 billion for wind and solar energy subsidies over the next decade. This represents a 21-fold increase in the cost of these subsidies just since 2015, according to calculations made by energy journalist Robert Bryce.

The market capitalization of General Electric (GE) hovered just above $70 billion in the summer of 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act was signed by the president in August. By late February 2024, GE was worth $167 billion.

Is that a coincidence?

An April 2023 CNBC report was titled: “From GE to Siemens, the wind energy industry hopes billions in losses are about to end.”

It predicted a possible end to a “tough couple of years for the U.S. wind energy industry” because of an “air of optimism within the industry, driven in large part by billions of dollars in new tax credits and subsidies toward clean energy investments included in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.”

The Largest Wind Farm in the Western Hemisphere

The prophecy was coming true by January 2024, as demonstrated by this corporate communication from GE:

Recognizing that decarbonization needs to go even faster, the U.S. government has once again stepped up its policy support. For many years, solar and wind projects have benefited from the basic production and investment tax credits, which have been extended multiple times by Congress in the past. But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) not only provides the long-term certainty of those PTC and ITC, it also has other bonuses, and one job that GE Vernova takes on is helping developers hit the targets required to qualify for those bonuses. [emphasis added]

Or, if phrased as a new mission statement, “GE: Helping developers hoover up your tax dollars!”

The GE statement was promoting the work of one of those developers.

Getting renewable electricity to big population centers is a growing challenge in the United States, but in the high desert of central New Mexico a plan is coming together. There, near the tiny town of Corona, GE Vernova will deploy 674 of its new “workhorse” 3.6-154 wind turbines for the SunZia project and its developer, Pattern Energy. When completed in 2026, this colossus of a project will weigh in at a total 3,500 MW, making it the largest wind farm—and in fact the largest renewables project—in the Western Hemisphere, providing enough power for some 3 million people.

Spread out over a million acres, SunZia’s ambitious scope has been compared to the Hoover Dam. [emphasis added]

Boasting of this huge chunk of the environment that must be compromised to make room for its wind turbines is an odd way for GE to promote its power systems.

So is the Hoover Dam comparison. A January 2024 E&E News report more substantively predicted SunZia would provide “three times more power annually than the Hoover Dam.”

The million acres projected to be used to build SunZia equals 1,562 square miles.

Sitting between the “tiny town of Corona” and the Hoover Dam is the Grand Canyon, a hole in the ground so huge that astronauts can clearly see it from orbit. The canyon, plus all of the roads and land on either side of it that make up Grand Canyon National Park, add up to just over 1,904 square miles.

By way of comparison, the Hoover Dam is small enough that you need to drive to it before it becomes visible. Lake Mead, the otherwise very large reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, takes up only 247 square miles when it is full.

By GE’s own estimate, to generate three times the carbon-free electricity produced from the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead project, the largest wind power project ever put on this side of the Earth will need to devour six times more of the planet.

Hydroelectric dams take up a lot of space, arguably too much in some cases. But the Hoover Dam apparently still uses less land per kilowatt hour of power than GE’s newest wind turbines will require. (And another advantage beyond the carbon-free electricity is that Lake Mead stores enough water to irrigate 2,300 square miles of farmland and provide fresh water for 16 million people.)

GE’s engineers should check the math on the press statements being sent out by the PR department.

And compared to other carbon-free power options, the Hoover Dam comparison isn’t even remotely the worst one GE could have chosen. The “tiny town of Corona,” near where the SunZia wind facility is being built, is a 646-mile drive east from the Hoover Dam. In the same general direction, but just 575 miles away, sits the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.

From a mere 6.4 square mile plot of land 60 miles from downtown Phoenix, Palo Verde annually produces more than 31 terawatt hours (TWh) of zero-carbon electricity and is capable of more than 32 TWh each year.

In 2023 the Hoover Dam produced a combined 2.7 TWh of electricity for Arizona and Nevada. If the SunZia project really does triple the power output of the Hoover Dam, then it will annually generate 8.1 TWh of power. So GE is boasting that it needs 244 times more land than Palo Verde to produce just 25 percent of the carbon-free electricity kicked out by the nuclear station.

This means a nuclear facility opened more than 30 years ago is still nearly 1,000 times more efficient with land use (i.e., “the environment”) than GE’s latest and greatest wind machines will be.

The Old Wind Turbines

On the positive side, at least they’re using the new stuff.

Media accounts from January 2022 through January 2024 show at least 13 fires, blade breaks, tower collapses, and other serious malfunctions credited to GE wind machines. Seven were in the United States.

About 550 miles north of where SunZia will be built a GE wind turbine caught fire after its tower collapsed in Colorado on the morning of January 11, 2024. This was apparently less than two days after GE posted the statement describing SunZia. The Colorado turbine was one of 19 GE wind machines that were in motion at the Spring Canyon II wind facility in late 2014. By the dates provided in a CBS media account, the turbine had lasted just over nine years before it fell over.

Three months earlier in October 2023, two different blades snapped off the same GE turbine at a wind facility in Germany. The same wind farm had a nearly identical problem with another of its GE turbines in September 2022. Following the 2022 incident, nearby farmers complained that debris from the malfunction had polluted their fields.

In March 2023, one of 14 GE turbines at a brand-new wind facility in Lithuania fell to the ground when the tower buckled. According to the account in ReNews.biz, a “malfunctioning sensor” had caused the turbine to misbehave and topple the tower.

Also in March 2023, a GE turbine managed by NextEra energy in New York caught fire during high winds that scattered burning fiberglass and other debris all over the town. The local newspaper covered an April 2023 meeting on the incident with the headline: “Heated meeting as residents with fiberglass particles on land, trees and possibly ponds question wind turbine fire.”

And in January 2023, a GE turbine collapsed at another NextEra facility in Wisconsin. In March 2023, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported: “Nearly two months later the remains of the crumpled tower are still where they fell, it’s 86-ton turbine and blades resting partially buried in a hole created by the impact.”

In Ireland a few months earlier in October 2022 an offshore GE turbine caught fire in the Irish Sea. Media accounts raised the possibility of a lightning strike on the machine.

Then in August 2022, a GE turbine at an Oklahoma wind power facility came down in a fiery crash. “The utility company said the cause of the incident is under investigation,” reported Fox Weather, “but the scene looked similar to the destruction of a wind turbine in Texas after a direct lightning strike in late July.”

That July 2022 incident in Texas also involved a GE turbine. According ReNews.biz, the wind machine had been in operation since 2019 and the developer of the project believed a lighting strike had been the cause of the “catastrophic fire.” Fox Weather reported that “videos from witnesses and firefighters showed the wind turbine generator ablaze and disintegrate in the sky over Crowell, Texas.”

(Note for further investigation: Could it be that weather-dependent wind power systems are peculiarly vulnerable to . . . the weather?)

Also in July 2022, a blade broke off of a GE turbine in Sweden. ReCharge News reported that a family with children had been picking berries nearby the malfunction. The headline of the ReCharge News report led with this quote: “Lucky family wasn’t hurt.”

In June 2022, according to Bloomberg, another GE wind turbine that had “been in operation for less than a year” crashed down in Oklahoma. Unlike the August 2023 incident involving a supposedly lightning-afflicted GE turbine in Oklahoma, this one happened on a calm, clear day.

The January 2023 Bloomberg report was titled: “Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over.” The same report covered yet another incident from June 2022:

Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.

Similarly in January 2022 a blade from a GE wind machine in Germany broke into multiple pieces and fell off the turbine.

IRA to the Rescue?

The Bloomberg report in January 2023 showed General Electric wasn’t the only turbine maker in trouble by that point:

The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit; and they could result in more expensive insurance policies . . .

The race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the newer turbines, and that’s quite concerning,” says Fraser McLachlan, chief executive officer of London-based GCube Underwriting Ltd., which insures about $3.5 billion in wind assets in 38 countries. If the failure rate keeps climbing, he says, insurance premiums could increase or new coverage limits could be imposed.

But this was just as hundreds of billions of dollars in goodies from the federal government were set to begin raining down on the weather-dependent wind industry by way of the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.

Is it reasonable to conclude that your tax dollars are the only thing keeping the wind turbine grift alive?

Sometimes even the experts are honest about it.

“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” said billionaire investor Warren Buffett, way back in May 2014. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Thanks to the IRA, they now make 21 times more “sense” than they did when Buffett said this.

*****

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

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot KCCI News

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Farmers’ Revolt Over Radical Green Agenda Could Reshape Europe Ahead Of EU Elections thumbnail

Farmers’ Revolt Over Radical Green Agenda Could Reshape Europe Ahead Of EU Elections

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By Tristan Justice

European farmers are reshaping the political landscape across the Atlantic just months before the EU’s parliamentary elections.

European farmers are reshaping the political landscape across the Atlantic about two months before 27 member states of the European Union (EU) vote on new leadership in their parliamentary elections.

Between June 6 and June 9, residents in the more than two dozen EU countries will elect 720 politicians to represent them as the continent confronts floundering economies and a potential war with Russia. Major demonstrations from agricultural workers, who are disillusioned by cheap imports and overregulation in the name of environmentalism, have rocked the region for years. The discontent has escalated in recent months, leading to last-minute concessions from EU elites desperate to maintain political capital ahead of the June elections.

In 2023, Dutch farmer protests generated global headlines as more than 10,000 people fought aggressive emissions regulations. The new rules threatened to shut down up to 3,000 farms. The Dutch demonstrations have been followed by similar uprisings in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, and others over burdensome regulations and Ukrainian grain imports undermining local produce.

In February, the European Commission tried to do some damage control, scrapping a bill aimed at halving pesticide use and reigning in agricultural emissions as leaders brace for political blowback at the polls. But the specific limits on pesticides appear to be a minor point among farmers, who are tired of the overwhelming rules and regulations.

“We’re tired of working and getting underpaid,” explained one farm protester in a BBC interview. “We are fed up that they won’t let us do what we want to do in the fields. They force us to plant what they want us to plant. They force us to use the herbicide that they want, and apart from that, we are being underpaid.”

Protests have persisted in recent weeks, with demonstrators dumping manure in the streets and spraying it at police. Arnaud Rousseau, who runs the largest farmers union in France, told The New York Times in a recent interview, “It’s the end of the world versus the end of the month.”

“There’s no point talking about farm practices that help save the environment, if farmers cannot make a living,” Rousseau said. “Ecology without an economy makes no sense.”

“The discontent threatens to do more than change how Europe produces its food,” The New York Times reported Sunday. Right-of-center political parties see the populist anger as an “illustration of the confrontation between arrogant elites and the people, urban globalists and rooted farmers.” The electoral success of these parties would likely change the political dynamics in the EU, not just in the form of easing off agricultural regulations but also in seeking to curb migration and scrutinizing spending on Ukraine.

The farmers are just the most vocal opponents of the bureaucratic leviathan suffocating the entire EU under a mountain of rules and regulations. Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi goes through the numbers in his latest book, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.

The European Union, Harsanyi writes, “is no longer ‘federalist’ by any conception, but rather an institution that demands economic and regulatory conformity.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Harsanyi adds, exploited the EU pandemic recovery program in 2020 “to push forward the European Green Deal and exert greater control over member states.”

This was tradition. In the early 1980s, the number of EU laws reached 14,000. The EU passed 25 directives and 600 regulations per annum in the 1970s, but those numbers rose to 80 directives and 1,500 regulations by the early 1990s. By 2005 the EU had passed 170,000 pages of active legislation and 666,879 since its inception in 1957. As of June 2019, 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s environmental laws had been tethered to EU policy.

In other words, farmers might be generating headlines for mass demonstrations against overregulation from the administrative state, but the problem stretches across the European economy. The ensuing political backlash may change Europe’s direction on issues well beyond agricultural policy if the farmers’ revolt successfully sweeps in new leadership to the EU parliament.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Arizona Attorney General Says She Won’t Enforce State Supreme Court Ruling Banning Abortion thumbnail

Arizona Attorney General Says She Won’t Enforce State Supreme Court Ruling Banning Abortion

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By Arjun Singh

Democratic Attorney General Kristin Mayes of Arizona announced on Tuesday that she would not enforce a ruling from her state’s supreme court upholding an 1864 law that bans most abortions.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a law criminalizing abortions, except in cases where necessary to save the mother’s life, may be enforced following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Mayes, one of the named parties in the case, subsequently issued a statement on X condemning the decision while claiming that her prosecutors would not enforce the law against doctors and women seeking abortions. (RELATED: Arizona Supreme Court Rules Near-Total Abortion Ban Can Go Into Effect)

“[L]et me be completely clear, as long as I am Attorney General, no woman or doctor will be prosecuted under this draconian law in this state,” wrote Mayes. “Today’s decision to re-impose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state.”

“Absent the federal constitutional abortion right…there is no provision in federal or state law prohibiting [the 1864 law]’s operation. Accordingly, [it] is now enforceable,” wrote Justice John R. Lopez, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, for the court’s four-member majority. While the court’s entire bench was appointed by Republican governors, two of its members — Chief Justice Robert Brutinel and Vice Chief Justice Ann Timmer — dissented from the decision.

Republican leaders of the Arizona House of Representatives, which is empowered to impeach officials under the state constitution, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Why Are Elected Republicans Helping Democrats Reward A Failed Education System? thumbnail

Why Are Elected Republicans Helping Democrats Reward A Failed Education System?

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By Neland Nobel

Editors’ Note:  We in Arizona are indeed fortunate that our Republican leaders have been leading the nation in school choice. But, Democrats and their allies the teachers’ union will always be trying to cut back school choice and so we must remain ever vigilant. On a national level, we must be sure our Representatives and Senators support cutting the funding or eliminating altogether the Department of Education.

Republicans are increasing financial support for a broken public education system that is openly hostile to conservative families.

Researchers at Harvard and Stanford have now confirmed what parents across the country have known for some time: Public education “experts” decimated an entire generation of children with their heavy-handed and politically charged Covid-era policies. Yet, rather than beg forgiveness and seek reconciliation, those very same “experts” are doubling down.

Many public schools are transforming K-12 curricula based on the Marxist tenets ingrained in critical race theory, while stories involving young women being injured by male transgender high school athletes are now commonplace. Some public school districts have even taken to grift, joining the wave of lawsuits against social media companies and their insidious algorithms, while ignoring their own contributions to the nationwide adolescent mental health crisis.

In 2014, while campaigning for president, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was sharply criticized for stating that school choice is “the most compelling civil rights issue of the 21st century.” The senator was absolutely correct, yet a decade later only nine states have adopted policies establishing universal education freedom. To make matters worse, elected Republicans are increasing financial support for a broken public education system that is openly hostile to conservative families.

Just within the last few weeks, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a $1.2 trillion funding package that allocates almost $80 billion to the left-wing Department of Education. Conservative parents might reasonably ask whether elected Republicans (many of whom send their own children to private school) actually have their best interests at heart. 

Pennsylvania: A Study in Bipartisan Failure

Notwithstanding the mind-boggling federal spending on public education, more than 90 percent of K-12 expenses are funded by state and local taxes. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Josh Shapiro recently touted his $1 billion increase in K-12 education spending, bringing the total annual expenditures on public education to a whopping $19.1 billion, or 44 percent of the total state budget. For some perspective, spending on education in Pennsylvania was about half that, $9.6 billion, in 2019.

It would be easy to blame Democrats for this astounding display of fiscal irresponsibility, but Republicans have controlled the Pennsylvania legislature for much of that time. One would hope that this profligate spending would have led to meaningful increases in compensation and greater job satisfaction for teachers, the individuals doing the hard work of educating the next generation. But that is not the case. Four years and billions of dollars later, Pennsylvania lost nearly 10,000 teachers in 2023 alone.

So, despite doubling funding in recent years, Pennsylvania teachers are miserable and leaving the profession in droves. What about the kids? One would expect that they are thriving as a result of the billions in extra money flowing into Pennsylvania public schools, but that is not the case either. In fact, Pennsylvania kids are still struggling to recover from the immense harm caused by the state’s enforcement of unlawful policies.

Pennsylvania families are also fighting the cultural battles infecting schools throughout the country. For example, in late 2022, the Central Bucks School District was targeted by a complaint from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleging that certain school district policies and practices were hostile toward LGBT students. After the district spent more than $1 million on the investigation, the superintendent was forced to resign and Democrats regained control of the school board in the following election. Just to rub it in, the newly elected school board president in that district took her oath of office on a stack of controversial LGBT books. At least one thing is clear — the left has mastered the lawfare game at every level.

Contrast that episode with my experience in the nearby Unionville-Chadds Ford School District. I have spent the last three years trying to hold local school officials accountable for their unlawful conduct during the Covid debacle. Because there is no ACLU equivalent for conservative families, however, the school district has thus far completely ignored my public complaint. At the same time, parents and teachers in my district are left to grapple with the destruction caused by those institutional failures.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians in the commonwealth are nowhere to be found. To be sure, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee has lamented the governor’s out-of-control spending, but a cursory reading of his list of grievances reveals that he is long on criticism and short on solutions. Republican officials in Pennsylvania cozy up to conservative voters when they need them, but then continue to fuel a public education system that is diametrically opposed to the primacy of parental rights.

In Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court held that parents have a fundamental right “to control the education of their own.” A few years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the court affirmed that government cannot unreasonably interfere with the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. Nevertheless, a century later, the state has far more control over the destiny of our children than anyone ever expected.

Parental support for school choice mirrors the overwhelming support for congressional term limits yet seems destined for the same fate. Gov. Shapiro campaigned on expanding school choice, but once he was elected promptly abandoned his promise. So Pennsylvanians are left with the status quo — teachers aren’t happy, parents aren’t happy, and children are falling behind. Yet the public education machine barrels on.

Since 2000, the public school administrative class in Pennsylvania has grown by nearly 40 percent, and the top 10 superintendents in Pennsylvania make well over $250,000 per year. Yet the average starting salary for teachers is still below $60,000 throughout much of the state. The system isn’t working for anyone but the people who decide how to control the flow of Pennsylvania’s $20 billion education budget.

What is happening in Pennsylvania is a perfect example of the extent to which Republican officials have betrayed conservative families, the very people they are supposed to represent. In an election year, it is fair for those voters to take a closer look at the people seeking their support. The data is in, and the harm to children caused by the disastrous policy decisions during the pandemic is undeniable. So what are parents to do about it?

For all the blame they can justifiably lay at the feet of Democrat politicians and their powerful union bosses, perhaps it is time to turn their attention to elected Republicans. Rather than hold the “experts” accountable and demand comprehensive school choice as a form of reconciliation, Republicans are instead rewarding a public education establishment that indisputably harmed children and still aggressively pushes policies that intentionally undermine conservative families.

It is time for Republican officials to step up for those families. If they don’t, then perhaps it is time for those families to stop supporting Republican politicians.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Principleless, Panicked and Power-Hungry thumbnail

Principleless, Panicked and Power-Hungry

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By James Allan

Pandemic Panic was a fascinating book to read, especially for a lawyer like me. It very quickly had my blood pressure way up as it reminded me of the nearly three years of governmental thuggery, heavy-handedness, imposition of idiotic and often irrational rules, and resort to lockdown lunacy. If that last sentence sounds as though I was a lockdown skeptic, full disclosure I was. From virtually day one this native born Canadian, who has lived in Australia for two decades, was an open skeptic of the lockdowns on the pages of the Spectator Australia, the British Lockdown Sceptic website (now Daily Sceptic), and once or twice in Law & Liberty in the US. I even had a couple of published peer-reviewed law articles on the topic rejected for listing by SSRN (presumably because only public health types were then deemed suitable to comment on this fiasco, and only lockdown cheerleader ones at that). Right from the start it seemed silly to me, verging on crazy, to think that in conditions of great uncertainty what you ought to do is proceed directly to some version of the precautionary principle on steroids, thereby mimicking the authoritarian response of the Chinese politburo – and in the process throw away a hundred years of data that informed the then pandemic plans of the British government (and the WHO for that matter) and that unambiguously rejected lockdowns.

The smart response in an information vacuum is to carry on as you are making changes at the margins to protect those most at risk as you wait for more information. And very early on it was known that this virus was over a thousand times more deadly to the very old than to the under-thirties. In most countries, for most of the pandemic, the average age of those dying from COVID was over the country’s life expectancy. For governments to proclaim that ‘we are all in this together’ was not true in any sense that could lead to the sort of policy response we saw everywhere in the democratic world outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota and a few other outliers that got their responses more or less correct (a fact that today’s cumulative excess deaths data, from start of the pandemic to today, brings home in the bluntest fashion going). Nor should it have led to the sort of massive government spending and debt and money printing that effectively (in part via asset inflation) transferred huge wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich. Or that shut down schools in a way that will see many children, especially poor ones, disadvantaged for life.

So full disclosure, I came to this book very sympathetic indeed to the authors’ underlying position that the national and provincial government responses in Canada were seriously wrong-headed. The authors detail the ‘sometimes inane, often unprecedented and unusual public health measures taken over the roughly three-year pandemic period’. They recount public policy absurdities, including the Province of Quebec requiring unvaccinated people to be chaperoned in plexiglass carts through the essential aisles of big-box stores and the city of Toronto taping off the cherry blossoms and of quarantine hotel nightmares and incompetence. You can read of police heavy-handedness, sometimes more aptly described as thuggery, and of the differential treatment of anti-lockdown protesters as compared to, say, BLM protesters (both during the pandemic). Readers learn that Canada imposed a vaccine mandate for citizens to travel by plane, train or ship domestically or internationally. And that the provinces of Ontario and Quebec had some of the world’s longest lockdowns. Oh, and there are two chapters that touch on the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, especially how the Trudeau government needlessly invoked the Emergencies Act (think ‘threats to the security of Canada’, martial law type legislation) to deal with non-violent – though clearly loud, disruptive and annoying to many – truckers’ protests in Ottawa of the sort that had been dealt with elsewhere in the country using parking by-laws and the Highway Code. This emergency legislation, by the way, allowed the government to seize the bank accounts of anyone participating and assisting the convoy, which it did of many.

Having said all that, the book is very much focused on the law and the legal aspect of the governmental responses to the pandemic. The overarching approach starts with Canada’s entrenched bill of rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The two authors, both constitutional lawyers, look at how some of the key enumerated rights fared in protecting Canadians against government overreach. The book is structured so that each chapter considers a different one of the key rights provisions. For example, chapter two considers freedom of assembly, chapter eight freedom of expression, chapter seven the equality right, and so on including religious freedom and privacy rights. Moreover, in terms of running readers through some of the key decisions by the top judges in Canada (and occasionally the US) the book is a handy little primer of cases brought, their outcome, and how the judiciary treated attempts to wind back government pandemic regulations and rules. The short answer to that, of course, is that in case after case after case the judges upheld governments’ COVID measures. The Charter of Rights did nothing. Nor, for that matter, did any bill of rights in any jurisdiction in the democratic world – leave aside one or two ‘churches can open if big stores can, too’ cases in the US and Scotland. But essentially one way to read this book is as a compendium of the myriad failures as regards the attempt to beat (or at least to ameliorate or even just to take the edge off) the lockdown heavy-handedness through the courts.

Thus far thus good then. The book is interesting, informative and with an underlying sense of a pervasive disbelief at just how panicked, principleless and even power-hungry the public health and political castes were during the pandemic. Throw in most journalists too if you wish.

Yet having conceded all that, for my way of thinking the core premise of this book is all wrong. You see I am a long-time skeptic of the desirability of bills of rights and in a way that many Americans will not have encountered. In essence my view is that when you buy a bill of rights you are ultimately just buying the views of the lawyerly caste and of the unelected ex-lawyers who are the top judges. Worse, if you are outside the US there is no way to import US First Amendment jurisprudence, along with your post-WWII Bill of Rights, so that you will almost certainly end up with outcomes that downplay free speech outcomes much more than in the US. In Canada and Europe rights analysis takes place in two steps – first judges decide on the proper scope of the enumerated right and then they move on to consider whether the governmental legislation is a reasonable, justifiable and proportional inroad on it. So stage one is something of a freebie and allows judges to virtue signal because all the work is done at stage two. Worse, this proportionality analysis is at its core plastic and – much as with the claim of Lon Fuller’s hypothetical judge in his famous The Case of the Speluncean Explorers – allows its user to reach either outcome in play perfectly plausibly. You tell me the answer you want, said Justice Keen in that Fuller mock hypothetical Speluncean case, and I can use the approach to give it to you. Ditto proportionality analysis or the second stage in Canadian Charter analysis. (Of course this is not to say that rights in the US are treated as absolute. They are not. It is just to say that in American analysis there is only one step, deciding the scope of the right. This may impose slightly more constraints on the deciding judges. Maybe.)

At any rate, during the lockdowns judges in Canada (and let’s be blunt, around the democratic world) were as panicked as all the other elites. Retired UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption may have noted early on that the authoritarian response to COVID amounted to the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years. Yet he was a very solitary voice. Nearly all the judges were as frightened and panicked as most everyone else. There was next to no chance litigants were going to roll back governmental regulations through the courts. I said so in print at the start of the crisis and I believe events have proved that true. My take was that we would have to wait till everyone calmed down and the panic subsided and then you would see the judges discover a bit of a willingness to overturn some of these rules and regulations. But as far as the COVID years were concerned the entire edifice of human rights law, and all its accoutrements, was totally useless. Worse than useless in fact.

But I suppose my deeper objection to the foundational worldview on which this book rests is that I do not think we really should even want to live in a world where the lawyerly caste – whose political and social views the evidence today clearly shows to be an order of magnitude or more to the left of, and more ‘progressive’ than, that of the median voter’s – could decide these sort of issues through the courts. And that is true even when we strongly, even vociferously, disagree with what the government is doing, as I did throughout the pandemic. The remedy here had to be political. Elect someone who will stand up to the panic and show what should be done. If we lived in a world where unelected judges could roll back what elected governments did (however stupidly and pusillanimously) trying to deal with a worldwide pandemic then it’s not clear to me what would ultimately be left to the voters and democracy. Put more bluntly, after decades of working in university law schools around the Anglosphere and knowing the lawyerly and judicial caste very well indeed I can tell you that I fully agree with the sentiment William Buckley conveyed when he said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty. For me, make that also the lawyerly caste that gives us our top judges. The authors of this book implicitly disagree with that core sentiment of mine, though our view of the pandemic overreach is much the same. Wherever readers stand on both those issues, this is a book well worth reading.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Is Learning Standard “White” English Oppressive for Black Students? thumbnail

Is Learning Standard “White” English Oppressive for Black Students?

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By George Leef

Among the many destructive ideas loose in American education is that black students should not be expected to master standard English because doing so is demeaning and demoralizing for them. Standard English is part of the power structure of “whiteness” that must be overthrown before we can have an equitable society. Professors at esteemed universities are making that argument and it appears to be catching on. Faculty who want to prove their “anti-racist” dedication are changing their teaching and grading to avoid penalizing black students who, after all, already face terrible obstacles in a society that supposedly looks down on them.

The most prominent advocate of this position is University of Michigan professor April Baker-Bell. In her view, “traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm or consequences these approaches have on Black students’ sense of self and identity.”

Before we go any further, do all black students suffer emotional harm if their English is corrected? There are many black scholars who write in perfect English. I don’t think either Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams ever decried their anguish at having to adopt standard English in their academic work. Professor Baker-Bell herself appears to have overcome the “emotional harm” of writing in standard English. It’s hard to believe that any of those academics would have been better off if teachers and professors had said to them, “Your writing is fine; it’s authentic. No need for you to adjust to the needless, old-fashioned rules of standard English.”

Another advocate of allowing black students to keep “their” language is Professor Asao Inoue of the University of Washington at Tacoma. In his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future, Inoue contends that writing instructors should evaluate students based on their “effort” in writing and not on whether they succeed in producing perfect or even acceptable standard English work. In his view, black students must be handled with kid gloves lest they think that “white” America is looking down on their preferred manner of communicating. Once we get over that, we can have a just future.

Are those ideas good? Will it help make for a socially just country if we allow blacks to write as they’re used to? There is some disagreement over this, and not just from white professors.

One dissenter is Professor Erec Smith, who teaches at York College. He has written a book entitled A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition and in it, he makes a devastating attack on the notion that it’s wise to give black students a pass when they write poorly.

First, Smith (who is black) doubts that black students are so caught up in their identity that it would be harmful for them to change the way they communicate. He observes that many blacks have mastered standard English without any apparent suffering. A particularly telling case is W.E. B. DuBois, who is known for his opposition to the racist attitudes of 19th and 20th century America.

Smith relates that when DuBois was a student at Harvard, he once received a low grade on an English paper. That bothered him, but he had the good sense to realize that the grade had nothing to do with his race and that if he wanted to make his criticism of society as effective as possible, he needed to make his writing the best it could be.  So he bore down in that course and signed up for other English courses that would sharpen his writing skills.

DuBois, in short, saw standard English as a tool he could use to help accomplish his objectives. Mastering it would empower him.

Conversely, the “anti-racist” writing notions abounding today disempower black students. Smith argues that the likes of Baker-Bell and Inoue allow blacks to retreat into self-pitying victimhood. Doing so solves no problems in America and actually gets in the way of constructive actions. Obsessing over “white privilege” doesn’t help black students succeed.

Another dissenter is Professor Jason D. Hill of DePaul University. In his article “The New Ebonics Movement and the Elimination of Whiteness,” Hill excoriates the “anti-racist” educators. He states that their ideas are “rooted in the de-colonialist and Anti-Western civilization agendas that seek to eradicate from school curricula any European universal foundations that underlie pedagogy, method and content.” That stance is politically expedient for them, but their hostility to teaching standard English will only damage the prospects for black students as they compete for jobs against others, including immigrants, who speak and write in better English.

The costs of this attack on language competency fall on black students, not on these “anti-racist” professors. Hill observes that they “are paid large sums to lecture white progressives on how they should alter their pedagogical styles to expurgate standard English requirements.” They desire to serve “as a managerial vanguard over Black victimization and suffering.”

Where would the “anti-racist” educators be if black students were able to improve their use of language so that they could obtain good jobs and no longer feel victimized by “white” society? They wouldn’t be nearly so famous and would have to do more of the onerous work of correcting student papers.  Not a good trade.

And if composition instructors don’t correct black students on their poor English, what is the point of having classes? As Professor Smith observes, with the “anti-racist” approach, “Nothing exists to master; nothing is there to be taught.” Black students will like the high grades they receive for their efforts, but the time and money spent will have been for naught.  W.E.B. DuBois would be disgusted.

I’d like to point out that getting language right isn’t the only aspect of life where learning to do things “the right way” matters. Consider music. If a black pianist wants to have a career in classical music (which is often attacked as oppressively “white,” but strangely enough, some black musicians still desire to succeed in it), he will have to master performance conventions developed in white Europe centuries ago.  Is that a painful affront to his identity? If he thinks so, he’ll have to set his sights on a different career, but if he loves the music, he’ll eagerly learn how to play Bach and Beethoven the right way, not as he might instinctively prefer. Many have done so.

The notion that black students are somehow harmed by insisting that they master standard English is one of those many ideas so ridiculous that only a university professor could ever believe it.

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Murthy v. Missouri Is About Not Only Coercing Big Tech But Controlling Individuals thumbnail

Murthy v. Missouri Is About Not Only Coercing Big Tech But Controlling Individuals

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By Stella Morabito

Ultimately, at stake is the right to communicate openly, which translates into your right to build community without state interference.

Censorship and loneliness always go together because political censorship is always designed to cut us off, to stop us from speaking openly to others. Let’s ponder that connection as we await the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.

But first, let’s dispense with the formalities and the legalese. The Murthy case is supposedly about whether or not the government has a right to try to “persuade not coerce” third parties, including social media companies, to shut down content it claims is incorrect and/or potentially harmful.

This is not a narrow case that stops at allowing government actors to talk to third parties about content they deem “misinformation” affecting national security or public health. Murthy is ultimately about enabling an enormous censorship-industrial complex to control individuals’ conversations — and by extension, individuals’ relationships — at the behest of government actors.

Any SCOTUS ruling in favor of the government would blow the door wide open to undermining the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech for hundreds of millions of individual Americans.

Even if you don’t believe that, you should at least consider the connection between such political censorship and social isolation. We cannot think of free speech as an abstract value or an outdated convenience.

Ultimately, at stake is the right to communicate openly, which translates into your right to build families and your right to make friends without state interference.

Ultimately, any ruling for the government in Murthy would correspond to the proverbial camel’s snout spitting its orders into the tents of every American’s private life.

Yes, Your Private Life

Too few people understand that the primary purpose and the main effect of political censorship is intensely personal, a point I’ve explained here at The Federalist. In addition to cutting us off from other people and ideas, censorship instills fear of punishment for wrongthink. As more people fear speaking openly, we create a spiral of silence that isolates us further. This dilutes personal relationships along with the potential for building relationships and breeds a more alienated and dysfunctional society.

Free speech is how people get to know one another, building social trust and a healthy private sphere. It’s how we are able to solve problems through the cross-pollination of ideas. It’s the first line of defense against tyranny.

That’s really what’s at stake in this case. We should be alarmed by justices who seemed to be toying with our First Amendment rights during the oral arguments of the Murthy case last month.

Cringeworthy Moments During Oral Arguments

There were several unsettling moments during the oral arguments. From Justice Kantanji Brown Jackson complaining that the First Amendment could “hamstring” the government to several of the justices using brazen hypotheticals, there were numerous indications that the government might prevail in gutting free speech.

Plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty thoroughly discredited one of those hypotheticals in a recent Federalist article, explaining there is no comparison between government interactions with a traditional media outlet and its interactions with Big Tech companies. There are “asymmetrical power dynamics” in the latter case which “create a relationship ripe for unconstitutional government coercion.”

The oral arguments also invited me to reflect on President Ronald Reagan’s warning that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” It came to mind when I heard the lead attorney for the government inject this gem into the proceedings: “I think one of the flavors you get from the amicus briefs on our side of the case is there are a lot of valuable ways where the government has information or expertise that it can offer to private speakers, and it would be a shame to chill that.” One of the flavors I get from that statement is the taste of a proverbial mafia don giving “an offer you can’t refuse.”

Has government “expertise” always proved valuable? “Affordable” health care? Its claim that the weirdest election in American history was the freest and fairest? Fifteen days to flatten the curve? The safe and effective Covid injection? President Joe Biden’s statement that different opinions about the Covid mandates were “killing people”?

It’s bad enough that we have several Supreme Court justices working hard to undermine the Constitution that they ever-so-quaintly swore to protect. What’s worse is that during oral arguments, some of the justices presumed to be solid on constitutional principles could conceivably rule for the government’s right to regulate all internet content, possibly on a technicality such as whether or not one of the plaintiffs could prove future harm. As Joy Pullmann noted, Americans simply cannot afford a weak ruling in Murthy.

Why Should Anyone Trust the Government?

The First Amendment exists precisely because governments cannot and should not be trusted. The government is often called a Leviathan because it’s powerful and bloated and insatiable and alienating. Individuals are being silenced by an unholy partnership among government, corporations, and Big Tech. The First Amendment guarantees that individuals — who don’t have that kind of power — should at least be permitted their voices. Now more than ever!

Another great irony in this case is that the named defendant, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, recently produced an advisory that can serve as a blueprint for unprecedented government control over our social connections, supposedly to “solve” our loneliness epidemic in the name of public health.

Read it. It proposes that the government track and monitor our personal relationships through the health sector and Big Tech. It proposes building a new “social infrastructure” placed “everywhere people gather” — in your local volunteer organization, your schools, your libraries, transportation hubs, sports leagues, you name it. So if the Murthy v. Missouri ruling goes in Murthy’s favor, it will pave the way for more censorship and surveillance. Ironically, that would only worsen our epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist 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 Biden/Obama 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 Entire Push To Halt New Natural Gas Exports Traces Back To One Ivy League Prof And His Shaky Study thumbnail

The Entire Push To Halt New Natural Gas Exports Traces Back To One Ivy League Prof And His Shaky Study

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By Nick Pope

A questionable study by a Cornell University climate scientist gave climate activists and the media ammunition to wage a pressure campaign against the Biden administration to take action against liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

Cornell’s Robert Howarth authored the October 2023 study, which purported to find that lifecycle emissions associated with LNG exports are far greater than those attributable to domestically-mined coal. Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, amplified the study, and climate activists lobbying the Biden administration to kill LNG exports cited it as evidence to substantiate their position before the White House announced the moratorium on LNG export terminal approvals on Jan. 26.

The study, titled “The Greenhouse Gas Footprint of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Exported from the United States,” found that “greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are also larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 44% to more than 2-fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.” Howarth, who openly opposes the use of fossil fuels, admitted to releasing his study before it was peer-reviewed in order to influence the LNG export debate.

“According to the ethical guidelines from several of the professional societies to which I belong, scientists have a duty to provide information to the public and to decision-makers on important public issues when they have access to such information,” Howarth told the DCNF.

Howarth said environmental activist Bill McKibben was the one who convinced him to release the study before it underwent the months-long peer review process. McKibben himself wrote about the study in The New Yorker in October 2023, touting it as evidence that the Biden administration should not expand LNG export capacity.

After McKibben published his piece for The New Yorker and Howarth released the study to the public, the duo joined a November 2023 press call alongside several climate activists and Democratic lawmakers — including Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley — to talk about the issue of LNG exports, according to E&E News.

“From what I am told by reporters and what I read in the press, yes, my paper has had some impact,” Howarth said.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported Howarth’s work influenced the Biden administration’s decision to pause approvals for new LNG export hubs.

Howarth’s study “clearly was a factor in the Biden administration’s decision to pause making the required determinations required for approval of new LNG export projects and launching a U.S. Department of Energy study of the climate impact of LNG exports,” Steven Hamburg, the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist, told Bloomberg News.

The White House invariably felt pressure from left-wing lawmakers and environmental activists who regularly cited the study in their push to choke off U.S. natural gas exports.

Merkley cited the Howarth study as “the latest climate science” in a November 2023 letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Sixty-four other lawmakers signed that letter, which called on Granholm to update her agency’s review process for LNG export facilities to include climate impacts.

Likewise, the Sierra Club promoted a story that cited the study and referred to one of the affected LNG export hubs as a “carbon bomb.” A disruptive outfit called Climate Defiance promoted the study on social media before meeting in December 2023 with Senior Advisor to the President John Podesta to lobby against the planned expansion of LNG export capacity. (RELATED: Biden Admin Leaned On Questionable And Misleading Science To Justify Halting Natural Gas Hub Approvals)

Scores of environmental groups cited Howarth’s study in a letter sent to President Joe Biden applauding his Jan. 26 decision to pause new LNG export terminals. In their letter, eco-activists also demanded Biden “[stop] all LNG and related fossil fuel infrastructure permits across all U.S. federal agencies.”

‘Widely Panned And Largely Dismissed’

Howarth‘s findings contradict plenty of existing research on the subject, including two Department of Energy (DOE) studies from 2014 and 2019, which concluded that American LNG exports to Asia and Europe do not create more lifecycle emissions than regionally-mined coal when used to generate power. The Cornell professor’s study has drawn the ire of the oil and gas industry, which has pointed out that Howarth‘s most recent findings are detached from a robust body of research on the subject.

“Dr. Robert Howarth openly admitted he prematurely released his not-yet-peer-reviewed study in order to influence politics and advance activist agendas against responsible oil and gas development,” Jeff Eshelman, the president and CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, told the DCNF. “His research – which has been widely panned and largely dismissed by the scientific community – ignores the environmental benefits of U.S. natural gas and LNG, including data by the Department of Energy.”

Howarth — described by Politico as a “longtime sparring partner with the gas industry” — has come under fire for peddling shaky science about natural gas in the past. Back in 2012, he told a columnist for the New York Post that he was trying to make the anti-fracking movement more mainstream and trendy.

Howarth himself is closely tied to environmental activism. He is a board member for Food and Water Watch (FWW), a green nonprofit that has campaigned against natural gas development and exploration in New York state, though he denies this unpaid position influences his work.

His new paper was funded in part by the Park Foundation, a left-wing nonprofit with a stated goal of “[challenging] continued shale gas extraction and infrastructure expansion” and a strong presence in New York state, where Howarth’s university is located. Howarth told the DCNF the Park Foundation’s “modest” financial support of the study did not constitute a conflict of interest, and that the organization has no influence over his work.

The Park Foundation’s environment committee “recognizes that a firm stance against further oil and gas development is a necessary component to future funding decisions” and is resolved to support initiatives that “commit to the ‘keep it in the ground’ philosophy” or otherwise resist oil and gas drilling and infrastructure expansion, according to the organization’s website.

The Park Foundation gave Cornell University more than $530,000 to support natural gas-related academic work between 2010 and 2021, according to a DCNF review of tax filings.

Howarth’s study cites seven of his own previous papers, of which at least five were funded in part by the Park Foundation, a DCNF review of those studies found.

Howarth routinely slams Republicans on social media, castigating the “party of disinformation and misinformation” as a “cult” whose members “simply do not care about truth.” He’s also vocal in his opposition to the continued use of fossil fuels.

“I definitely consider myself to be an objective scientist,” Howarth said. “I also am a citizen, and as such have an ethical obligation to participate in our society. So no, I am not apolitical. But I am confident that my political views do not affect my scientific research.”

‘Not A Guarantee Of Quality Or Accuracy’

Howarth arrived at his topline finding by calculating the emissions caused by natural gas exports at every stage — from initial extraction to processing to final destination and end use — and comparing those emissions to the amount generated by every step of domestic coal extraction and use.

But Howarth has revised his study several times since releasing his study to the public. The initial version asserted that the lifecycle emissions of LNG exports are greater than those of domestically-produced coal, with the difference ranging between 24% and 274%. The study was updated on Jan. 13 to reflect that “total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 27% to 2‐fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.”

Howarth announced on March 13 that he had again revised his study “using this new estimate, 4.6% emissions (not including urban/surburban (sic) distribution systems) for the best studied major U.S. shale gas fields.”

After the March update, the study now asserts that LNG exports can have lifecycle emissions that are greater than those of domestic coal by between 44% and 200% or more.

These updates have come under considerable criticism from the oil and gas industry and scholars.

William Jordan — general counsel for EQT, a natural gas company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — suggested to the WSJ that Howarth cherry-picked data and leaned on flawed assumptions to pursue influence rather than understanding.

“I received two anonymous reviews from the journal just before Christmas, as well as input from people who had read the original version online. I revised the manuscript based on these comments, and submitted it back to the journal on January 13,” Howarth told the DCNF in defense of his updates.

“The version posted online now is the latest version,” Howarth told the DCNF. “It is very much standard to revise in response to peer review comments. That is precisely what peer review is about!” (RELATED: Could Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Pause Cost Dems The Senate In November?)

Roger Pielke Jr., a former academic who has written extensively about politicized science, told the DCNF that while such practices are common, they’re less than ideal.

“The posting of pre-prints is now standard practice in many fields, and they are exactly that — pre-prints,” Pielke said. “That said, passive peer-review is not a guarantee of quality or accuracy, but in many cases a minimal check for quality. No one paper offers the last word, and these days, studies are often conducted with an outcome in mind.”

“That imposes a challenge on all of us, journalists especially, to be careful and critical consumers of the latest and greatest science,” Pielke said. “Too often published research is used to support favored and previously-held positions rather than considered on its merits.”

Howarth’s study also heavily relies on a 20-year timeframe to assess the impacts of emissions from LNG exports. Typically, researchers adopt a 100-year outlook, a number which Howarth describes as “arbitrary” in his work.

“Using [the twenty-year timeframe], LNG always has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than coal,” Howarth writes in the study.

“What we see here is the standard climate activist and Biden administration formula at play,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “First, you allege a problem exists without any scientific basis. Then, you identify a ‘study’ with findings you like that can be used to form a basis for policy advocacy, which you pass onto your former fellow activists who are now in the administration, and let them run with it.”

*****

This article was published by Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot

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 Biden/Obama 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 Results of California’s New $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage Are Already In thumbnail

The Results of California’s New $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage Are Already In

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By Jon Miltimore

Thousands of jobs have already been eliminated by California’s law to raise the minimum wage to $20 for restaurant workers, which goes into effect April 1.

For eight years, Michael Ojeda delivered food for a Pizza Hut in Ontario, California, using the income he received to support his family.

In December, the 29-year-old received a letter from the pizza franchise informing him that his employment was being terminated in February. The news shook him.

“Pizza Hut was my career for nearly a decade and with little to no notice it was taken away,” Ojeda said, whose story was recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal.

Ojeda appears to be just one of the thousands of casualties of a new California law that will raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour on April 1 for all restaurant chains that have at least 60 locations nationally.

Making $20 instead of $15 sounds like a win, but economics shows there’s no such thing as a free lunch. California lawmakers just proved it.

When the minimum wage goes up, the money to pay workers must come from somewhere, and it typically comes from three places: higher consumer prices, reduced labor costs in other areas (fewer workers, fewer hours, reduced benefits, etc.), and lower profits and capital expenditures.

Many minimum wage proponents want to focus just on that last item (profits) and ignore the other adverse consequences of the policy. But events unfolding in California show this is a mistake.

Restaurant franchises such as Chipotle, Jack in the Box, and McDonald’s have already announced they’ll be jacking up prices to cover increased labor costs, which are expected to increase by roughly $250,000 per location for many of these restaurants (though the economics here is nuanced).

But raising menu prices isn’t the only way California restaurants are responding. Records submitted to the state show Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza plan to sack nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. Other chains are taking similar actions, and many restaurants have stopped hiring new workers.

This is not unexpected. Critics of the law predicted it would result in less employment, and that’s exactly what has happened.

“California had 726,600 people working in fast-food and other limited-service eateries in January,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “down 1.3% from last September, when the state backed a deal for the increased wages.”

This is not the only way restaurants will reduce labor costs, of course. Benefit cuts, fewer hours, and a shift toward automation are also on the table. But the layoffs at California restaurants are what is currently generating the most attention, and for good reason.

Work isn’t just a paycheck. For many, it’s something that brings meaning, an idea the author David Sturt explored in his bestselling book Great Work, which showed that even so-called “unglamorous jobs” often provide purpose and a sense of responsibility to those who work them.

This is one reason researchers say losing a job can be psychologically crushing. It destroys that sense of purpose while simultaneously taking away from people the single biggest antidote to poverty: a job.

This is not mere rhetoric. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that just 4% of people who spend at least 27 or more weeks per year in the labor force fall below the poverty line (compared to 12.4% overall). Census data show that the rate falls to 2.4% for those who work full-time year-round.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a job is the single most important path out of poverty.

This is why so many economists lament minimum wage laws. They reduce employment by raising the cost of labor above the value the worker is able to bring to the employer. This is why minimum wage laws tend to fall hardest on the most vulnerable workers in society, consigning to the unemployment line those with the fewest skills and who can offer the least value to employers.

“There is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period,” the economist Murray Rothbard stated.

If you doubt this, consider Ojeda, who, after eight years as a driver for Pizza Hut, was unceremoniously axed. The wages and tips he received as a driver are gone, and he recently filed for unemployment.

How Ojeda will continue to provide for his mother and partner is unclear. But how he arrived here is: California lawmakers outlawed his job by presuming to know what a “just” wage is for restaurant workers.

Now, the California legislature is reportedly scrambling to carve out additional exemptions for restaurants.

For Ojeda and the thousands of other fast-food workers put out of work by California’s law, it’s already too late. These job losses reveal the truth of economist Thomas Sowell’s famous adage: The real minimum wage is $0.

*****

This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Honey Am I Male? thumbnail

Honey Am I Male?

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By Craig J. Cantoni

In advance of an upcoming elective surgery, I have been on the phone with personnel from a local Tucson hospital to provide my medical history, insurance coverage, and other required information. The hospital does a great job and its employees are personable, professional, and thorough.

A charming woman asked me on one of the calls what my gender identity is.

Before answering the question, I said, “I know you’re required to ask the question, but I bet you get a lot of grief over it.”

She responded with a sigh, “For sure.”

The question is silly on more than one level, but particularly so in light of the fact that the surgical procedure in question can only be done on men who are biologically male, have all of their natural appendages, and want to keep all of them.

Anyway, I answered the question by saying, “I am a male.” Then I added, “But let me get a second opinion from my wife, who is standing here.”

“Honey, am I a male?”

She answered, “You’re not only a male but also an Italian stallion.”

Okay, that’s not what she said, but I’m not going to lose more of my male pride by repeating what she actually said.

After chuckling, the hospital employee said, “I’m required to ask a related question: What are your preferred pronouns?”

All kinds of smartass answers came to mind, but not wanting to exceed the patience of the employee, I replied, “he, him, his.”

Reflecting on the conversation, I am struck by how the idea of tolerance—of living and let live—has morphed into a national fetish for fairness and a mass pathological fear of possibly being seen as insensitive, intolerant, and unenlightened.

Small but vocal groups, claiming to be victims of horrendous injustices, have people and institutions jumping through hoops, engaging in inane communications, and wasting time and money in keeping records of the inanities so as not to be sued or canceled.

And it’s happening with regard to many more issues than just gender identity.

In going along with the silliness and being powerless to do anything about it, I feel like a gelding instead of a stallion.

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Am I Male? thumbnail

Am I Male?

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By Craig J. Cantoni

In advance of an upcoming elective surgery, I have been on the phone with personnel from a local Tucson hospital to provide my medical history, insurance coverage, and other required information. The hospital does a great job and its employees are personable, professional, and thorough.

A charming woman asked me on one of the calls what my gender identity is.

Before answering the question, I said, “I know you’re required to ask the question, but I bet you get a lot of grief over it.”

She responded with a sigh, “For sure.”

The question is silly on more than one level, but particularly so in light of the fact that the surgical procedure in question can only be done on men who are biologically male, have all of their natural appendages, and want to keep all of them.

Anyway, I answered the question by saying, “I am a male.” Then I added, “But let me get a second opinion from my wife, who is standing here.”

“Honey, am I a male?”

She answered, “You’re not only a male but also an Italian stallion.”

Okay, that’s not what she said, but I’m not going to lose more of my male pride by repeating what she actually said.

After chuckling, the hospital employee said, “I’m required to ask a related question: What are your preferred pronouns?”

All kinds of smartass answers came to mind, but not wanting to exceed the patience of the employee, I replied, “he, him, his.”

Reflecting on the conversation, I am struck by how the idea of tolerance—of living and let live—has morphed into a national fetish for fairness and a mass pathological fear of possibly being seen as insensitive, intolerant, and unenlightened.

Small but vocal groups, claiming to be victims of horrendous injustices, have people and institutions jumping through hoops, engaging in inane communications, and wasting time and money in keeping records of the inanities so as not to be sued or canceled.

And it’s happening with regard to many more issues than just gender identity.

In going along with the silliness and being powerless to do anything about it, I feel like a gelding instead of a stallion.

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 Biden/Obama 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 Cut Flowers Civilization thumbnail

The Cut Flowers Civilization

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By Ben Shapiro

This week, famed British atheist Richard Dawkins explained that he was a “cultural Christian.”

Praising civilization in the United Kingdom, Dawkins stated:

I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. But there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

Dawkins went on to praise Christianity as a “fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Dawkins’ case for Christianity—a case made on the basis of utility—is nothing new. It was made long ago by Voltaire, an acidic critic of the church who famously averred, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn’t animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote:

The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. … Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity—the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.

We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than this week, when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society’s reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences.

It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including a deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are “made in the image of God”—ignoring the last half of the biblical verse, which reads, “male and female he made them.”

What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means re-engaging with the source of our values—the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Signal 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Is a CCP Army Invading via Our Open Border? thumbnail

Is a CCP Army Invading via Our Open Border?

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By Catherine Salgado

Is America’s greatest existential enemy, the genocidal Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exploiting Biden’s open borders to send agents or soldiers into the U.S.?

Numbers of illegal aliens pouring into America to receive taxpayer-funded freebies continue to climb, but one nationality is particularly showing a stunning leap in migrant numbers. Fox News’ Bill Melugin tweeted on April 2:

“Border Patrol arrests of Chinese nationals who crossed the U.S. border illegally over recent years.

Fiscal Year 2021: 342

Fiscal Year 2022: 1,987

Fiscal Year 2023: 24,125

Fiscal Year 2024: 22,233 (so far)

6,300% + increase since FY’21.”

Why should you be worried? As I have reported before, experts warned that the CCP is almost certainly sending in plants among the illegal alien horde. But with numbers as high as they are, and the fact that so many of these Chinese illegals have been military-age men, one has to wonder if a whole army of CCP soldiers is invading America.

It is extremely and increasingly difficult to escape from China and get all the way to America as a Chinese dissident, and it is very unlikely that tens of thousands of dissidents are simultaneously escaping and making their way to Latin America and thence to the U.S. without CCP hindrance. Some, no doubt, are dissidents, but that does not explain over 45,000 Chinese migrants suddenly appearing at our border just over the last year and a half. The CCP has certainly been growing increasingly aggressive and disdainful toward the U.S. under weak, China-pandering Joe Biden.

We know the CCP has multiple illicit police stations in America and has infiltrated our institutions and government, even paying off Biden and family. Unknown numbers of criminals, terrorists, and gang members are pouring into America as illegal migrants too. Most significant of all, the Biden administration deliberately reduced the vetting on Chinese migrants to a laughable level of irrelevance. Is it such a stretch of the imagination to think the CCP would be taking advantage of the open southern U.S. border and non-existent migrant vetting to send in a lot of soldiers or agents?

And if they are, we had better watch out—we might wake up one morning to find World War III happening right on our doorsteps.

*****

Catherine Salgado is an accomplished writer and investigative reporter who publishes daily in her Substack column, Pro Deo et Libertate (For God and Liberty). This superb column provides news and opinion pieces from an honest, common-sense perspective in the spheres of culture, politics, liberal arts, and religion. The Prickly Pear is grateful for her permission to reproduce her public writings and recommends that our readers subscribe to Catherine’s superb Substack column. Please consider a paid subscription for full access to all of her excellent and informative writings.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Chinese-Owned Chemical Giant Expanding Into US Heartland Led By Members Of Communist Party, Influence Orgs thumbnail

Chinese-Owned Chemical Giant Expanding Into US Heartland Led By Members Of Communist Party, Influence Orgs

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By Philip Lenczycki

Top executives behind a Chinese chemical manufacturer planning to build two U.S. factories belong to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and affiliated influence outfits, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.

Capchem Technology USA, the wholly-owned subsidiary of China-based Shenzhen Capchem Technology (Capchem), is slated to build a $120 million factory in Ohio and a $350 million plant in Louisiana. At the same time, Capchem records and social media posts that the DCNF translated show the company employs dozens of CCP members. Executives at Capchem and Capchem USA have also held positions at organizations affiliated with CCP influence operations, a DCNF review of Capchem’s website, Chinese social media account and executives’ social groups found. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Firm Tied To China’s Military Industrial Complex Plans To Roll Out Massive Battery Chemical Plants In US)

The DCNF’s investigation is based, in part, on information provided by the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action. The DCNF previously reported that Capchem, which makes chemicals used for batteries in electric vehicles, has received tens of millions of dollars in subsidies from Chinese government agencies, including a blacklisted Chinese government entity that plays an instrumental role in the CCP’s “Military-Civil Fusion” efforts.

“Communist Chinese companies have no place on American soil,” New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, told the DCNF. “The Communist Chinese-owned company has a concerning history of advancing CCP military technology, presenting a clear and pressing national security threat.”

A Capchem spokesperson acknowledged that “some” of its employees are CCP members, but that “the company doesn’t have exact statistics about the number of them.”

However, a DCNF review of Capchem’s Chinese social media account found that the firm reported employing 44 CCP members as of June 2020. A separate social media post from 2023 identifies Capchem President Zhou Dawen as Party Secretary of the company’s CCP branch.

A “Party branch” is the smallest “grass-roots” CCP organization, and is required in Chinese institutions containing three or more Party members, according to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which is China’s state organ for legal supervision.

“As a privately controlled company, Party member identity does not influence company management or operations,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.

Yet, the CCP Central Committee’s Organization Department says party committees are meant to “guide and oversee enterprises in obeying state laws and regulations, unite their employees, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all parties and promote the sound development of their enterprises, with a focus on carrying out the [CCP]’s principles and policies.”

In July 2019, Capchem’s own social media account shows the CCP Committee in the Pingshan District of Shenzhen recognized Zhou as an “Outstanding Party Secretary” during an event celebrating the CCP’s 98th anniversary.

“This honor doesn’t belong to me personally, it belongs to all of Capchem’s Party branch comrades,” Zhou said during the 2019 event, according to the post. “As an old CCP member, I have a responsibility and duty to do my best for the Party’s cause.”

“My experience tells me, as long as we work according to the instructions assigned by our superior Party unit, work conscientiously, obey the law and what may come, the enterprise will most certainly overcome obstacles and usher in a better future,” Zhou said.

Capchem’s spokesperson admitted Zhou is “a member, but he is at retirement age,” adding that Capchem USA “does not employ any member of the Chinese Communist Party.”

[Screenshot of Capchem’s president and CCP Party Secretary Zhou Dawen from the firm’s social media account]

But Capchem USA executives have been affiliated with groups identified by U.S. government entities as serving CCP’s “United Front” strategy. “United Front” groups engage in “influence activities and intelligence operations,” according to the House Select Committee on the CCP.

The “United Front” system is led by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a “Chinese intelligence service” responsible for coordinating domestic and foreign “influence operations,” according to the U.S. government-funded U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Capchem Chairman Qin Jiusan is identified in a Louisiana business filing as a director of Capchem USA.

Qin’s company bio previously disclosed his membership in the Pingshan branch of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identified the CPPCC as one of several “important actors within the United Front system” in a 2023 report.

The CPPCC’s English-language charter states that delegates must “uphold the leadership” of the CCP, “take advantage of the CPPCC as a United Front organization,” and “keep state secrets.”

Qin is also a member of the Pingshan branch of the All-China Federation Of Industry And Commerce (ACFIC), according to the Shenzhen municipal government and CPPCC websites.

The UFWD lists ACFIC as a “subordinate,” and ACFIC describes itself as CCP “led” and tasked with linking the CCP “with people in non-public economic activities.”

A Capchem spokesperson confirmed Qin is a “local member” of the CPPCC and ACFIC. Capchem itself is also a corporate member of ACFIC, the spokesperson added.

However, Qin’s CPPCC affiliation disappeared from his company profile after the DCNF reached out for comment.

[Image created by the DCNF using screenshots from Capchem’s website.]

Capchem previously scrubbed references to its products being used in “high-end military equipment” and within the “military and aerospace industries” from its website after being contacted for comment by the DCNF.

“When these companies start scrubbing their websites, it’s clear that we’re on the right track,” Mike Howell, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, told the DCNF.

‘Follow Closely In The Party’s Steps’

In May 2023, Capchem announced that a “top advisor” to ACFIC’s Shenzhen branch, who was also a former China Ministry of Aerospace official, inspected the firm’s headquarters and met with company chairman Qin Jiusan.

The Shenzhen UFWD’s social media account also contains posts indicating that United Front officials have inspected Capchem facilities several times, including in February 2020 and April 2022. Photos from the 2020 and 2022 inspections show Qin leading UFWD minister Li Guangming on a tour of Capchem’s headquarters.

In August 2022, Qin spoke at a UFWD event in Shenzhen, according to the Shenzhen UFWD’s social media account. In his remarks, Qin described a speech given roughly two weeks earlier by President Xi Jinping as “profound,” telling the audience it “clarified a series of major theoretical and practical questions concerning United Front work in a new era.”

“As the vice chairman of Pingshan District’s ACFIC, I will take the lead in strengthening my personal study [of Xi’s teachings],” Qin said, adding that he would also “follow closely in the party’s steps.”

“Exacerbating our reliance on companies like Capchem for the domestic manufacture of energy products would be a self-defeating mistake,” Bryan Burack, senior policy advisor for China and the Indo-Pacific at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, told the DCNF.

Capchem USA CEO Charlie Yao also previously belonged to an organization that the Chinese government has identified as serving the United Front, a Capchem spokesperson said.

Yao “was a member of the All-China Youth Federation from 1995-2000,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.

The All-China Youth Federation (ACYF) is a “patriotic United Front organization” that operates “under the leadership” of the CCP, according to the Chinese government.

John Dotson, deputy director of Global Taiwan Institute, called ACYF a “CCP-operated agency” and “United Front” organization.

“Any of ACYF’s officials would be subject to Party orders, Party discipline, etc.,” Dotson told the DCNF.

Capchem’s spokesperson, however, claimed that “neither Shenzhen Capchem nor Capchem USA has a relationship with individuals or entities involved in the CCP’s United Front.”

Burack told the DCNF that, given all Capchem’s CCP and United Front ties, he views the company as “part of the CCP’s influence apparatus.”

‘No Such Thing As A Private Company In China’

Capchem USA currently has plans to build chemical manufacturing facilities for electric vehicles in Lawrence County, Ohio and Ascension Parish, Louisiana.

Capchem USA also stands to benefit from U.S. government largess. Ohio’s Lawrence County recently granted Capchem USA a 50% tax break and Louisiana offered the firm a “$2 million performance-based grant for infrastructure expenses,” among other state incentives. Likewise, Capchem could also benefit from the web of subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.

The company’s plans, however, have come under scrutiny from lawmakers who believe the firm’s Chinese government ties present a national security threat.

“Examples like Capchem are all the more reason we need to ensure Chinese companies are not eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer funding to further entrench our reliance on CCP-dominated supply chains in strategic industries,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, told the DCNF. “There is no such thing as a private company in China.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation 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 Biden/Obama 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 Tailspin of American Boys and Men

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By Brenda M. Hafera

American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.

Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.

Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.

The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.

Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’sThe Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.

Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”

Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.

Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.

Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”

As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:

Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.

Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero-tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.

On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”

The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”

Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.

These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.

The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.

These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.

All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.

For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life: influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.

Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.

*****

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

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Lawfare Against John Eastman

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By Thomas D. Klingenstein and Ryan P. Williams

The regime has lost all perspective and decency in its war on its perceived enemies.

Dr. John Eastman is a patriot, a constitutional scholar, a lawyer, a husband, and a father. He is our friend, colleague, and fellow board member of the Claremont Institute, who has spent his life defending the principles upon which this great nation was founded. After a ten week travesty of a trial, a California Bar Court judge, seeking to criminalize disagreements in constitutional interpretation, recommended that John should lose his license to practice law in California. 

The term “lawfare” has become part of the American vernacular in the past few years. It means the manipulation and corruption of the legal system to gain political advantage and attack and destroy one’s political opponents. The most famous example of lawfare is, of course, the shocking abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s office in the state of New York, and the District Attorney’s office in Fulton County Georgia in an attempt to destroy the current Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald J. Trump. But the assault on Trump is just the most widely publicized example of this evil practice, which is destroying the rule of law in America.

Anyone who dares to oppose the reigning progressive regime, at any level and in any way, is a potential target of this lawfare. Especially targeted are those who dared to raise any question about the legality of the 2020 election. Prominent among these is John Eastman.

In his case, an activist group, States United Democracy Center, joined other activists in filing an ethics complaint with the California State Bar Association. As David Brock, one of the leaders in this lawfare, explains, the aim of these activists is “not only [to] bring the grievances in the bar complaints but shame [their targets] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” Specifically, they aim not just to disbar, but to destroy, the 111 attorneys who were involved in legally challenging the 2020 election results.

The Bar Association, which is overwhelmingly progressive, then becomes complicit in the lawfare. The legal travesty John suffered during his judicial proceedings is vivid in the transcripts of the trial and has been described in detail by Rachel Alexander of the Arizona Sun Times, which provided comprehensive day-to-day coverage of the trial. The entire proceeding was a mockery of the impartial judging of professional conduct that should be expected in such a tribunal. It was partisan grandstanding with a judgment that seemed preordained from the first week.

John will appeal, of course, and we expect him to prevail. But his case is a warning to us all of the increasing criminalization of any challenge to the progressive orthodoxy, whether the subject is elections, climate, race, gender, the economy, public health, or the Constitution. Concerned citizens of all stripes, whatever their opinions on John’s representation of and advice to President Trump in 2020 and 2021, should regard this trend with alarm.

We stand by John, applaud his fortitude in standing up against these shameful and un-American attacks, and pray that his courage is contagious.

*****

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

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot 60 Minutes

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 Biden/Obama 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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Review of Climate: The Movie (The Cold Hard Truth)

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By Peter Murphy

Editors’ Note:  The film reviewed by CFACT we have viewed and think is excellent.  It is factual and scientific, but easily understood by a layperson.  A link is provided in the third paragraph.  View the movie.  You will enjoy it and be better informed for doing so.

Our (mankind’s) ability to control the weather and change the planet’s climate is greatly exaggerated. More precisely, it is a fruitless and wastrel endeavor and unnecessary besides.

That is the main takeaway from the new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Hard Truth), written and directed by Martin Durkin and released last week.

The film can be viewed here.

Climate will always change, no matter how many square miles of solar panels and wind turbines desecrate the landscape and oceans, regardless of how many strip-mined electric vehicles the government attempts to force-feed us, and no matter how many trillions of dollars are printed and spent by politicians and virtue-signaling multi-billionaires.

Climate change is a natural phenomenon primarily influenced by solar activity, including sunspots, solar winds, and cloud formation. That’s right: the sun impacts Earth’s climate, something I learned by drawing pictures in kindergarten science, yet is disregarded by the vast climate change mega-industry of governments, corporations, media, grant-receiving scientists and professors, and the entertainment world.

Instead, said the industry is obsessed with carbon dioxide, which is a trace atmospheric gas comprising four ten-thousandths of the atmosphere, or 0.04 percent, that is essential to human, animal, and plant life. Indeed, CO2 makes the world livable and thriving, yet is falsely labeled a “pollutant” that somehow threatens the existence of Earth itself and must be curtailed. In fact, carbon in the atmosphere has been much higher at temperatures cooler and hotter than today, at levels resulting from temperature changes, rather than the cause of them.

Climate: The Movie features a series of interviews of prominent and credentialed scientists, including Steven Koonin, NYU professor and former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration; Richard Lindzen, retired atmospheric physicist from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Roy Spencer, meteorologist at the University of Huntsville in Alabama and an award-winning veteran of NASA; Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer at Harvard and the Smithsonian; and others, some of whom were blackballed for daring to challenge the prevailing climate change group-think narrative.

Another major feature of the film is data. How warm is the planet today compared to previous decades, centuries, and millions of years ago? Based on rock formations, temperature can be estimated going back as long as 500 million years. At the present day, it turns out Earth is in a colder period than the planetary norm. Measured over thousands of years, the climate has been quite stable, ranging within a few degrees, and now in an overall warming trend by about one degree since the late 1800s, during which average global temperature has varied modestly up and down.

Another key data point is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was four and five times higher than the levels of today, at 2,000-plus parts per million, including during ice ages. Yet, such realities have eluded climate obsessives like John Kerry and countless others who assert that nameless scientists warn of exceeding 400 parts per million means the planet is headed to a proverbial danger zone.

In sum, the climate changes of recent decades and centuries have ebbed and flowed in an unremarkable, non-threatening fashion.

The film also discusses the importance of accurately measuring global temperature change by making apples-to-apples comparisons, which the climate alarmist industry routinely ignores to fulfill its political narrative. Temperature records of 100 or more years past were commonly taken from thermometers in sparse areas when the U.S. was a more rural nation. These readings do not properly compare to results taken in dense areas of today due to the “urban heat effect,” studied by Dr. Spencer. By contrast, temperature data measured by satellites, ocean or rural-based thermometers show smaller vicissitudes over time.

How did it get this way? How did climate change alarmists become a pervasive influence? Money. It always comes back to the money, primarily from government.

After a global cooling period in the 1970s, when actor Leonard Nimoy (“Mr. Spock”) and many others warned of the coming ice age (even as man-made carbon emissions were sharply increasing since World War II), temperature reverted slightly upward. This spawned a movement championed by then-U.S. Senator Al Gore, who became Vice President in the Clinton administration, which sharply increased funding to study global warming.

Government research funding typically chases problems to “study” and solve, the film asserts. The climate change issue, with its growing alarm bells, unscrupulously parroted in the media for decades, has since gone far beyond government research grants to subsidizing big corporate industries (e.g., solar, wind, EVs) to purportedly lower the temperature.

Politicians from President Biden on down who peddle climate exaggerations, dutifully echoed by most national media, will go on ignoring the science and reality presented in Climate: The Movie. To otherwise embrace the scientific evidence from this robust film would mean the end of the climate gravy train and the climate alarmist crusade to expand government power and control over society.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, 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 Biden/Obama 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.

Self-Ownership and the Right to Self-Defense

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By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya

Self-defense is an ancient common law right under which necessary and reasonable force may be used to defend one’s person or property. As Sir Edward Coke expressed it in 1604: “The house of everyone is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defense against injury and violence . . . if thieves come to a man’s house to rob him, or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defense of himself and his house, it is no felony, and he shall lose nothing.”

The meaning of reasonable force has always been heavily context-dependent, considering the facts of the case including the intentions of the parties. If a trial were to become necessary in the scenario described by Coke, the court would have to establish that the intruders were indeed thieves intent on robbery or murder, or at any rate that the homeowner reasonably believed this to be the case. The use of force to defend oneself from an attack inherently carries the risk of causing the attacker’s death, making it necessary to ascertain that this was not merely a homicide masquerading as self-defense. Otherwise, anyone could shoot another and argue that he thought it was an intruder, as happened in the Oscar Pistorius case.

If the attacker shoots first, it is not unreasonable to shoot back. Difficult cases arise where the attacker is unarmed or armed only with the natural weapons of his own fists. The old common law rule, as reported by the Michigan Law Review in 1904, was that

it was not necessary the assault should have been made with a deadly weapon, but that an assault with the fists alone, if there was apparent purpose and ability to inflict death or serious bodily injury, was sufficient to justify the killing in self-defense. . . . a mere battery by the fists alone, will not justify an homicide, even where there is a great disparity of physical power, without a plain manifestation of felonious intent.

The felonious intent of the attacker (intention to inflict death or serious bodily injury) has long been treated as key to justifying killing the attacker, and such intention could only be judged in all the circumstances of the case. Mere words would not suffice, as one might shout, “I’ll kill you!” with neither felonious intent nor ability, and conversely an intention and ability to kill may be exhibited clearly without any words being uttered.

In the context of comparative law, Uwe Steinhoff controversially goes further to argue that self-defense ought to be lawful even if the attacker did not use his fists: “An attack need not involve physical force; rather, an attack is every threat of violation or actual violation of an interest that is protected by law (that is, of a right) insofar as this threat stems from human action.” Steinhoff distinguishes between an “attack” and “harm” as in his view one is still entitled to defend oneself against an attack without waiting to see the degree of harm, if any, that might result from the attack.

Imagine a scenario where a weak and puny man launches himself at a weightlifting champion with intention to cause harm, only for the attacker’s fists to bounce ineffectually off his victim (as happened once to Arnold Schwarzenegger). In Steinhoff’s view, the victim in this case, bigger and stronger than his attacker though he may be, would nevertheless have a right to defend himself with a reasonable degree of force.

The aim of mentioning these examples is not to comment on the current law, which is too heavily circumscribed by legislation and case law to permit brief summary. The aim here is instead to highlight some of the difficulties in ascertaining the boundaries of self-defense. Legislative rules are typically detailed and encompass numerous conditions and exceptions.

For example, in New York, “deadly physical force” generally cannot be used unless

“the actor reasonably believes that such other person [the attacker] is using or about to use deadly physical force. Even in such case, however, the actor may not use deadly physical force if he or she knows that with complete personal safety, to oneself and others he or she may avoid the necessity of so doing by retreating.”

That is easy to state, but in reality, how would one “know that with complete personal safety” violence can be avoided by retreating? In many circumstances where deadly force is used or threatened, there are no guarantees of “complete personal safety.” In Steinhoff’s example, it is rarely clear that there is no other way to save Snow White other than by taking out the evil queen: “Yet one is certainly allowed to tackle the evil queen with physical force in order to prevent her from giving the apple to Snow White if there is no other way to save Snow White.”

It is in practice often difficult (though not impossible) to show that there was no other way to avert the threat other than by use of deadly force, primarily because decisions must often be made in split seconds. The point here is that on a test of reasonableness, it would not suffice simply to say “there was no other way”—it would be necessary to show this to be in fact the case. It is one thing to understand clearly the meaning of self-defense and another to ascertain whether defensive action is justified on the facts of specific cases.

Natural Law and Natural Rights

From a natural law perspective, the right to self-defense is an element of the right to self-ownership. Self-defense entails the right to wield force in defense against any forceful invasion. As Murray Rothbard explains:

If every man has the absolute right to his justly-held property, it then follows that he has the right to keep that property—to defend it by violence against violent invasion . . . for if a man owns property and yet is denied the right to defend it against attack, then it is clear that a very important aspect of that ownership is being denied to him.

That is no more than a starting point, as it is still necessary to ascertain the scope of the right to self-defense. Rothbard asks:

How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else. . . . It follows that defensive violence may only be used against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property—and may not be used against any nonviolent “harm” that may befall a person’s income or property value. (emphasis added)

It is by no means straightforward to decide what “directly threatened invasion” means in specific cases. In Rothbard’s example, where “someone approaches you on the street, whips out a gun, and demands your wallet,” the threat is clear. However, he notes that an invasion or threat of invasion need not be “actual physical aggression” but may include intimidation or even fraud, which is “implicit theft” and thus a threat against one’s property. Rothbard insists however that the threat must be direct, overt, and clear; it must be “palpable, immediate and direct,” not “vague and future.”

Rothbard cautions that “in the inevitable case of fuzzy or unclear actions, we must bend over backwards to require the threat of invasion to be direct and immediate . . . the burden of proof that the aggression has really begun must be on the person who employs defensive violence.” Thus, violence can only be deployed in response to violence: “It would clearly be grotesque and criminally invasive to shoot a man across the street because his angry look seemed to you to portend an invasion,” and the response to a violent threat must be proportionate: “The criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his.” To shoot dead a shoplifter, for example, would be disproportionate: “In fact, the storekeeper has become a far greater criminal than the thief, for he has killed or wounded his victim—a far graver invasion of another’s rights than the original shoplifting.”

It would indeed be grotesque to summarily execute people for shoplifting, but that assumes a simple case where it is clear that the invader is intent only on shoplifting. The case would be different in circumstances where it is impossible to distinguish between a mere shoplifter and an intruder whose intention, as far as can be ascertained under the circumstances, seems reasonably to be to cause grave bodily harm. For example, in the case of Tony Martin, the outcome turned on the fact that the burglars were in the process of fleeing when he shot at them:

Fearon, 29, and 16-year-old Fred had travelled from Newark in Nottinghamshire on the evening of 20 August to raid Bleak House, the semi-derelict farm building in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk . . . Upon hearing them, Martin came down from an upstairs bedroom and opened fire with a pump-action shotgun. Martin claimed to have been acting in self-defence; prosecutors argued he had anticipated the pair and lay in wait for them.

The case would have been different if he had shot them on entry rather than exit. After all, it may not have been clear to him whether the burglars’ intention was merely to burgle or to cause him bodily harm. He could in theory have called out to the intruders, “Halt and state your intentions!” in the manner of a soldier on patrol, but most criminals intent on causing harm are unlikely to yield peacefully to such an inquiry.

In the common law context, these issues are all components of reasonable force. Deadly force used in response to a threat that is neither direct nor immediate but is merely speculative or remote would not count as reasonable.

Peaceful Adjudication of Disputes

To avoid these difficulties, common law jurisdictions have long upheld a strong policy preference for the peaceful settlement of disputes and have constrained as far as possible the deployment of force. In Jacque v. Steenberg Homes, Inc. (1997), the supreme court of Wisconsin observed in a case of trespass that one reason why the state steps in to vindicate violations of property rights is to discourage people from resorting to “self-help” remedies. In this way, courts hope to discourage people from deploying force in defense of their own rights:

In McWilliams, the court recognized the importance of preventing the practice of dueling, by permitting juries to punish insult by exemplary damages. Although dueling is rarely a modern form of self-help, one can easily imagine a frustrated landowner taking the law into his or her own hands when faced with a brazen trespasser.

The policy goal is “the preservation of the peace” or “providing an incentive for plaintiffs to bring petty outrages into court” instead of resolving the dispute by rashly throwing down the gauntlet in a fit of temper. For example, the case in the Michigan Law Review cited earlier involved parents fighting over the aggravating behavior of their children:

On the morning of the murder, the defendants were passing Hallgarth’s premises when he hailed them and a heated conversation ensued over some difficulty about Gray’s children at school. Hallgarth leaping over the fence, but without weapons of any kind except his bare fists, advanced in a threatening manner upon Gray, who thereupon drew his pistol and warned him to desist.

The reasoning behind the legislative regulation of self-defense is to discourage people from leaping over fences and resorting to fisticuffs in disputes with their neighbors. Most jurisdictions also prohibit or strongly discourage self-help in property disputes, especially in the context of tenancies, in favor of calling the authorities to deal with any violation of the owner’s rights:

It would still be necessary to prohibit forms of self-help, such as padlocking, because of the foreseeable and, therefore, unnecessary one-on-one confrontation. . . . It does not take a mystic or a psychologist to see the possibilities for violence and conflict in these scenarios. A lockout attempt, whether done face to face or like a thief in the night when the occupant is away, can be a provocative act. “It is difficult to imagine a more volatile situation from which extreme violence could be reasonably anticipated than the surreptitious removal of a man’s home, whether it be a rented one or a mortgaged one.”

The question libertarians must nevertheless ask is whether the state is justified, in its attempt to keep the peace, in limiting the right to self-defense. Even if we stipulate that the state is a parasite and everything the state does is therefore inherently wrong, it would still be necessary to address the question of how peaceful interaction can be maintained in situations where human beings are wont to fly off the handle and take potshots at each other with or without weapons. Human nature being what it is, this problem would also arise for private defense agencies to which people in a libertarian society had voluntarily subscribed.

To avoid violent conflict in a dispute resolution, it is certainly a good idea to encourage peaceful adjudication. It is however important to reiterate that the right being vindicated through such adjudication is not the right to a fair trial but, according to Rothbard, the right to self-defense:

Presumably, a free market will tend to lead to most people choosing to defend themselves with those private institutions and protection agencies whose procedures will attract the most agreement from people in society. In short, people who will be willing to abide by their decisions as the most practical way of approximating the determination of who, in particular cases, are innocent and who are guilty. But these are matters of utilitarian discovery on the market as to the most efficient means of arriving at self-defense, and do not imply any such fallacious concepts as “procedural rights.”

Agreeing to resolve disputes through arbitration proceedings, for example, or any other institutional form of dispute resolution must therefore not be taken as a reason to undermine the right to self-defense. The right to self-defense rests in the person whose property right is violated and not in society or in the state. Thus, the individual also has a natural right to bear arms as an emanation of the right to self-ownership. As Rothbard explains: “Every man has the absolute right to bear arms—whether for self-defense or any other licit purpose.”

*****

This article was published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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If You Don’t Build It, They Will Come: The BorderLine

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By Simon Hankinson

Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’s deliberate abandonment of every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe.

People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.

Last week, we were in San Diego County, California. On the first day, we started about 60 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean at Jacumba Hot Springs, visiting spots along the border wall:

The next day, we went to a San Diego bus station to see busloads of illegal aliens being released after cursory processing by the Department of Homeland Security:

On our last day, we visited Otay Mesa and later walked a couple of miles down the sand from Imperial Beach to the spot where the border wall comes down alongside Tijuana, Mexico, into the ocean:

Nothing makes the value of physical barriers more obvious than the spot near Otay Mesa, where Biden stopped construction cold on the border wall when he took office, leaving a giant gap right across from the outskirts of Tijuana.

Pictured: Aerial view of the U.S.-Mexico border and Otay Mesa port of entry. (Photo: Local unnamed business)

The local landowners in Otay Mesa obligingly allowed the U.S. government under the Trump administration access to their land to build a wall, only to be left with a gap that creates a giant unlawful “pathway” into the United States that is used daily by illegal crossers under the Biden administration.

On a visit to the gap last week, we watched one man walk into America through it unimpeded. A small group had already crossed and was sitting in the shade of the wall, waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up. Not only do they have zero fear of U.S. authority, but illegal crossers now are impatient to be apprehended so they can get released and head to their desired destination—usually a “sanctuary city” such as Boston, Denver, or New York.

Guessing several of this group were West African, I asked in French where they were from. “Mali,” a smiling man replied:

Although Mali has a number of active terrorist groups, chances are no one in this small group was a terrorist or had a serious criminal record. And if they had a criminal record in the U.S., they’d likely have evaded detection entirely as one of the 2 million or so “gotaways” who entered on Biden’s watch while Border Patrol was busy catching and releasing those who gave themselves up.

But we cannot know for sure. It’s a chance we’ll have to keep taking, because there is no way for DHS to verify the information given before it releases people by the thousands every day. Name, date of birth, country of origin, criminal history back home—that all is pretty much taken on trust, since few actually carry identification, and if they do, foreign documents can’t be quickly or easily verified by U.S. authorities.

Biden came to office promising to stop building the wall. That’s because Biden prioritizes illegal immigrant “rights” over U.S. national interests and enforcement of the law—and because border walls work and a completed wall could foil his priorities.

No barrier can keep out 100% of those attempting to enter illegally, but together with sensors and aerial surveillance, walls channel those attempting to enter illegally to spots where human agents can intercept them. With walls, measures to prevent asylum fraud, and meaningful efforts at law enforcement and deportation, a country can successfully defend its borders.

If walls didn’t work, then the Dominican Republic wouldn’t be building one along its 250-mile border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.

The Dominicans are watching their feckless neighbor collapse for the umpteenth time and don’t think they should be forced to accept the fallout from a failed state. A wall with controlled entry points for legal workers and commerce will give the Dominicans control over their sovereignty and who they admit while Haiti turns “into another Somalia,” as Dominican President Luis Abinader told The Wall Street Journal recently.

In contrast, Biden has abandoned finishing the U.S. wall and allows basically free entry. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wants “to be very clear: Our borders are not open.” Yet he admitted recently that over 85% of aliens caught entering illegally at the border are released. A door that opens 8.5 of every 10 times you push on it can hardly be called “closed.”

On our California visit, we saw small groups of people from multiple countries camped out near Jacumba Hot Springs, waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up and process them for release. We drove back and forth across dirt roads looking for spots where the wall ended at rocks or hills and left gaps through which people had passed, leaving mounds of trash in their wake. Once, we came across Border Patrol vehicles and a group of a hundred or so illegal immigrants they had just “caught” crossing the border.

What happens to them and the thousands of other people the Border Patrol picks up every day?

Those released at the border usually get a “Notice to Appear” in immigration court—in a few months or sometimes much longer—to defend themselves in deportation proceedings. At that point, many have achieved everything they wanted already by being allowed into the U.S., so they don’t bother to show up for their court dates.

If they do show up and claim asylum to avoid being deported, many abandon the process when it gets inconvenient. For those who go all the way through the process, a majority are denied asylum, because they aren’t being persecuted back home and are simply here looking for work (which is not a valid reason for receiving asylum). But then, at the conclusion of a long and expensive process, they stand little chance of actually being deported by a demoralized, defanged, activist-led Department of Homeland Security.

The Biden administration says its “strategy [is] to combine expanded lawful pathways with stronger consequences to reduce irregular migration.” Mayorkas claims that “people who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed.” No one believes this.

Certainly not the people we saw last week in San Diego from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who came here via several other safe countries. They were well aware they could bypass the legal U.S. immigration system, get into the country anyway, and stay.

As White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said after the State of the Union address, “Biden believes in treating everyone humanely” and in “not demonizing immigrants.” No one has a problem with that. The problem is that the Biden administration makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. To it, they are all welcome “migrants,” or “newcomers.”

In the San Diego border sector, we asked some Border Patrol agents how morale was. These are men and women who signed up to protect their country. They know what their job should be: deterring and arresting people who enter the U.S. without permission and intercepting drugs and the people who smuggle them. But since Biden and Mayorkas took over their agency, that’s not what they do anymore. They are relegated to working for a glorified social services agency at best, or the world’s most efficient alien-smuggling cartel at worst.

“I hate going to work every day,” one young Border Patrol officer told us. The view from the border is of a country that is losing self-respect. A country unwilling to enforce its own laws will descend gradually into anarchy, a state that will eventually attract few willing to defend it.

*****

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 Biden/Obama 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.

Questions for UA’s Provost Candidate thumbnail

Questions for UA’s Provost Candidate

/in , , , , /by

By Craig J. Cantoni

It’s almost a certainty that he wasn’t asked penetrating questions when he spoke the party line about diversity.

Two news stories on March 27 exposed what is wrong at the University of Arizona (UA), and, by extension, the Tucson metropolis.

The first was a story in the Arizona Daily Star about a presentation by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick to 75 staffers of UA and to 300 others who watched via Zoom.  Who’s he?  He is a candidate being considered for the position of provost at the university.

The second was a story in the Wall Street Journal about a South Korean company announcing plans to build a $4 billion advanced microchip plant in the small town of West Lafayette, Indiana, which is the home of Purdue University.  The chips are targeted for the burgeoning industry of artificial intelligence.  Like UA, Purdue is a land grant university.

Abd-El-Khalick’s presentation was replete with de rigueur and pro forma platitudes, sophistries, and banalities about his commitment to diversity, the disadvantaged, and the larger Tucson community.  He knew his audience.

No doubt, he didn’t get one question on why a $4 billion chip plant is going to be built in West Lafayette and not Tucson.

The reason is that Purdue has world-class and world-renown engineering programs in microelectronics and semiconductors.  Purdue has also benefited tremendously from the outstanding leadership of recently retired university president Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana.

For sure, Abd-El-Khalick wasn’t asked the following question:  What would help minorities, the disadvantaged, and the larger Tucson community more:  a) hollow, unoriginal rhetoric about diversity; or b) a $4 billion chip plant?

Abd-El-Khalick seemed to suggest that he is the embodiment of diversity, although his skin shade is not any darker than mine.  And with a PhD in science education, he certainly isn’t disadvantaged.

Given that I had a long career at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity, I have additional questions for Abd-El-Khalick:

Dear Mr. Abd-Ell-Khalick:

The following questions are not intended to be glib or provocative.  They’re being asked because it’s important for a candidate espousing diversity to be clear about the meaning of the word and to be explicit about the admissions criteria he would establish at the university.

You’re from Lebanon.  Does that make you a White person or a racial minority for purposes of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

If that makes you a racial minority, why so?

Israel is to the south of Lebanon.  Are Jews minorities for purposes of DEI?  Why or why not?

How about Armenians?

At one time, Lebanon was an example of a successful multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.  It no longer is.  Why did diversity stop working well there?

Mexican Americans account for approximately 40 percent of the population of the City of Tucson.  Italian Americans account for approximately five percent.  Are both groups considered minorities?

If Mexicans are considered to be both minorities and disadvantaged for DEI purposes but Italians are not, why are they seen differently?

Is it because Italians as a group have more income and wealth than Mexicans as a group?  How would you know that?  Wouldn’t it be fairer (and legal) to consider an individual’s income and wealth instead of the income and wealth of the person’s assigned group identity?

By the way, are you aware that of the 38 million Americans in poverty, 16.7 million of them are non-Hispanic Whites?

You seem to be saying that the University of Arizona should give special consideration to certain identity groups.  That implies that the university has been discriminating against qualified applicants from these groups and needs to take remedial actions.  Has the university engaged in discrimination?

These questions show why I’m not qualified to be a university provost or professor.

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 Biden/Obama 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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