“In addition to asking for a pause on all scheduled mail-in elections at its U.S. stores, Starbucks is requesting that all future elections be held in person while the allegations can be investigated.“
And we’re to believe mail-in ballots for federal elections aren’t subject to massive manipulation?!?
Late last week, the CDC revised its guidance for responding to Covid-19, taking a much-belated step to officially recognize the enormous change in how the disease spreads and the tremendous reduction in how deadly it is to those who contract it. Among the major alterations:
– The CDC no longer insists that it’s necessary to stand six feet away from others in order to avoid getting Covid; instead, the guidance suggests that avoiding crowds and maintaining distance might be a good means of minimizing exposure, especially for those at high risk.
– The CDC now states that individuals who have been exposed to Covid no longer need to take a Covid test if they don’t show any symptoms.
– Relatedly, the CDC is finally ready to abandon unworkable “test to stay” policies, which required kids who knew they had been exposed to Covid to obtain a negative test in order to return to school.
– The CDC is finally prepared to recognize that policies distinguishing between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals are unhelpful, both “because breakthrough infections occur” and because individuals who’ve had Covid without being vaccinated “have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”
Unfortunately, the new guidance continues to insist on the importance of wearing masks, even though there hasn’t been a single control-group study showing that mask mandates prevented the spread of Covid. Karol Markowicz makes this point, among others, in a column today for the New York Post:
When COVID first hit our shores, we naturally looked to the CDC for direction. The agency may have previously offered its thoughts on how we should cook our burgers (well-done) and whether we should eat sushi (no), yet it was primarily in the background wagging its fingers at us while we ordered our steak medium-rare (another no-no).
But with COVID, its word became policy. In what should go down as one of the most disgusting moments in public health, the CDC allowed, with direction from the Biden White House, Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers chief, to craft school-opening policies that forced classrooms across the country to remain closed in winter 2021.
No one has been fired for this dereliction of duty. No one has even been openly chastised for allowing a special-interest group to control our health-care policy. This alone is why the CDC must go.
And then there are the errors. “Well, it was a pandemic, and obviously mistakes would be made” only makes sense if those mistakes are quickly acknowledged and corrected. That hasn’t happened with the CDC.
It took until May 2021 for the agency to recognize that COVID-19 spreads through the air. It continues to push masking despite the fact there is not a single study with a control group showing that masking mandates prevent COVID spread. And not a single real-world example of a country that has managed to control spread through masking. We masked toddlers because the CDC said to. It was egregious. It was damaging.
In a statement announcing the new changes, the CDC’s Greta Massetti said that, “This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives.”
That’s all well and good, and I suppose there’s some wisdom in the stock phrase, “Better late than never.” I’d much rather that the CDC catch up to and acknowledge reality very belatedly than that it remain intransigent forever in order to save face. But I’m also not interested in pretending that this new guidance was anything other than very belated, and the CDC has yet to reckon with the fact that its recommended policies were nearly always behind the available data, unnecessarily draconian, and, for the most part, highly ineffective. Why should we ever trust the organization again, let alone allow its officials to dictate policy for the entire country?
Case in point, courtesy of Balls:
In a related item also courtesy of NRO, Nat Malkus totals COVID’s costs for kids, accurately asserting, “Officials made public-health bets that students will have to pay for”.
Speaking of the evils perpetrated by teachers unions, as FOX records, a…
“…The agreement, which was reached to end a two-week teacher strike last spring, says that starting this school year, “if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.” Excessing teachers is the process by which staff are reduced at a particular school due to a drop in enrollment, funding or other reasons.
The agreement further goes on to say that when reinstating teachers, “the District shall prioritize therecall of a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the district.”…”
This brings to mind a line from The Matrix:
Is it any wonder there’s both a police and teacher shortage in Minneapolis?!?
Then consider the mindset evident in this Notable & Quotable installment from the Journal taken from an article at Time:
“As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”
The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says. . . . “We abandoned what worked because we didn’t like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read.”“
You know,…what their job actually is!!!
And in the EnvironMental Moment, Best of the Web does its best to explain reality to Progressives bent on destroying our economy in pursuit of, ironically, a pipe dream:
Sorry, wrong pipe dream! We’re presenting this in full, as it provides a perfect primer for educating the ignorant and/or misinformed:
Congressional Democrats and the White House seem to be planning to engage in a rare and fleeting moment of deferred gratification this week. John Wagner and Mariana Alfaro of the Washington Post report:
President Biden remains on vacation on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island. He plans to sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law on Tuesday and deliver remarks, but the White House is preparing for a much larger celebration on Sept. 6, after Labor Day, when Americans are expected to pay more attention to what’s at stake in the fall midterm elections.
But what if Americans are already paying attention? They may have noticed the Friday update from the Penn Wharton budget modelers:
The Act would have no meaningful effect on inflation in the near term but would reduce inflation by around 0.1 percentage points by the middle of the first decade. These point estimates, however, are not statistically different from zero, indicating a low level of confidence that the legislation would have any measurable impact on inflation.
Democrats might want to go ahead and party now before they draw further attention to themselves. The Penn Wharton crew expects the act to make the U.S, economy slightly smaller over the next decade.
Like so many Washington budget plans, the Democrats’ new tax-and-spending frenzy promises little or nothing to reduce deficits in the early years but is officially projected to improve the federal fisc and boost the economy in the more distant future, by which time some of its most ardent champions will have retired and therefore won’t have to accept voter consequences.
If the act works as intended, there will also be an immediate flurry of carbon-dioxide emissions before the promised glorious future of carbon restraint. Most of the climate provisions take effect immediately or within a year or two, and the principal goal is to drive the production and deployment of solar, wind and battery power, all of which involves heavy use of fossil fuels.
The U.S. has become the world’s top oil and natural-gas producer owing to its abundant natural resources, hydraulic shale fracturing and other technological advances. The Inflation Reduction Act, however, effectively concedes American energy supremacy to China by turbocharging the government’s green-energy transition with $370 billion in climate spending.
Renewable energy requires vast amounts of critical minerals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium and graphite. China controls a large share of the world’s supply of each and also maintains a chokehold on their refining.Its near-total global monopoly extends to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, cells and components as well as solar cells.
Ms. Finley adds:
Democrats might reply that their bill’s tax credits would encourage electric vehicle and renewable manufacturers to “on-shore” supply chains. But subsidies that encourage mineral extraction in the U.S. won’t help if the Biden administration continues to block projects such as a lithium mine in Nevada and a massive nickel, cobalt and copper mine in Minnesota.
Even if some of the mining surge is permitted to occur in the U.S., it will still rely heavily on fossil fuels. In theory, Democrats’ big bonfire will be offset by future CO2 reductions, but what if it isn’t?What if intermittent solar and wind power can never be counted on to reliably and efficiently replace the fuels we need today? Even those inclined to believe in the more pessimistic climate forecasts, even those who think that upending economies now is more sensible than relying on future technologies to address potential challenges, should consider the costs of expensive environmental belief.
Because of their low energy density, wind and solar developments require enormous tracts of land, compared with other energy sources. New York’s now-shuttered Indian Point nuclear power plant sits on just 240 acres. Replacing its power entirely with wind power would require more than 500 square miles of turbines. That’s a massive amount of land and habitat lost to energy production.
People upset about carbon footprints may not realize just how large the allegedly non-carbon footprints can be. And when inefficient alternative energy sources fail, people have to come back to the efficient sources that environmentalists have shunned. Mr. Meigs adds:
…when Indian Point shut down for good in April 2021, all the wind and solar facilities in New York State combined were producing less than a third of the power churned out by that single plant. So, just as in other regions where nuclear plants have closed, grid operators turned to natural gas to fill the gap. Statewide grid-related CO2 emissions shot up by 15 percent.
The Inflation Reduction Act does include modest incentives for nuclear power, but nothing compared to the subsidies that will be showered on solar and wind. There are other contemporary examples of expensive investments in low-intensity energy sources that resulted in forced retreats to the energy sources that work. Mr. Meigs notes:
Russia’s Ukraine invasion slashed Europe’s energy supplies and exposed the risks of relying too heavily on wind and solar power. Some experts warn of blackouts, gas shutoffs, and economic chaos. Now European leaders are scrambling to get their hands on any type of fossil fuel they can. Germany is reopening coal mines and has asked the EU to roll back plans to limit investments in overseas fossil fuel projects.
Writing for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Iris Crawford makes the case that “even the dirtiest batteries emit less CO2 than using no battery at all” because over several years of use an electric car will result in reduced total carbon emissions compared to a gasoline-powered car. Still, she notes the significant upfront need to burn fuel:
Producing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles is more material-intensive than producing traditional combustion engines, and the demand for battery materials is rising, explains Yang Shao-Horn, JR East Professor of Engineering in the MIT Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Currently, most lithium is extracted from hard rock mines or underground brine reservoirs, and much of the energy used to extract and process it comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels. Particularly in hard rock mining, for every tonne of mined lithium, 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the air…
Manufacturing also adds to these batteries’ eco-footprint, Shao-Horn says. To synthesize the materials needed for production, heat between 800 to 1,000 degrees Celsius is needed—a temperature that can only cost-effectively be reached by burning fossil fuels, which again adds to CO2 emissions…
The vast majority of lithium-ion batteries—about 77% of the world’s supply—are manufactured in China, where coal is the primary energy source. (Coal emits roughly twice the amount of greenhouse gases as natural gas, another fossil fuel that can be used in high-heat manufacturing.)
If America ends up with the world’s most expensive collection of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries but still can’t rely on them to run our society, even ardent environmentalists may have to admit that the great fossil fuel bonfire of 2023 wasn’t worth it.
Here’s the juice: We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again…
And anyone who tells you different is either a mindless EnviroNazi or is personally profiting from the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the public…at least since the WuFlu lockdowns.
Moving on, here’s a septet of specially-selected items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Since we’re on the subject of certain Americans willfully empowering the Communist dictatorship of…
(3). The former Afghan president who once vowed, “No power in the world could persuade me to get on a plane and leave this country. It is a country I love, and I will die defending”, recently told CNN he fled “because it became impossible to defend it.” Guess some countries…
(5). The Morning Jolt poses the rhetorical question, “What if the law treated ALL politicians the same?” Our personal distaste for The Donald notwithstanding, he’d still be on the streets, while Nixon would have died in prison, and both Clintons, Obama, Eric Holder, all the Bidens, Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, Anthony Fauci, John Brennan, Jim Clapper and almost the entire senior leadership of the DOJ and FBI for the last 10 years…not to mention a significant percentage of the Pentagon Brass during the same time period…would be behind bars or just getting released, having forfeited their pensions or retirements.
“…Jesse B. Shaw, who had three arrest warrants and was wanted for stealing a car, was found driving an excavator on a property north of Banks in Washington County, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office said. Shaw allegedly ignored deputies’ commands to exit machinery and surrender.
Shaw drove more than a mile and a half in the slow-moving excavator as deputies plodded behind the vehicle in pursuit, the sheriff’s office said. Shaw eventually stopped and was arrested for attempting to elude police, the alleged stolen car, and the three arrest warrants. The arrest warrants included delivery of meth in Clackamas County, eluding arrest in Columbia County and a state parole board violation, deputies said…”
This guy traveled only marginally slower than Biden on a bicycle.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Though somewhat lengthy, Tucker’s Thursday monologue deserves to be viewed in full.
Tales of The Darkside
Former FBI deputy assistant director of counterterrorism Terry Turchie calls it like it is. Scary thing is, the same could be said of our Thoroughly Modern Milleytary.
On the Lighter Side
John Stossel reveals how your job is likely to predict your politics, meaning, if you’re a hard-working, productive, tax-paying American who adds value to the country, you’re likely voting Republican.
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