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Current Events

Political Passports

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Another great one from my friend and contributor Greg, and a good one it is. As promised I have given up posting President Joe Sanders’, no that’s not a typo, nation destroying actions. So what, besides Joe’s garbage, is going on in the swamp. even though it is Saturday. They never take a day off, not even Sundays, but I do. The Lord is going to get them for that. at least I sure hope so! 

 

 

 

 

By: G. Maresca

“Your Paper’s Please.”

It is a phrase with historical Cold War overtones from the East side of the Iron Curtin. Such an introduction may find itself being exercised from sea to shining sea if the armies of government bureaucratic COVID-19 zealots get their way regarding digital vaccine passports.

Communist China that tracks its citizens and uses medical tyranny to enforce compliance was onboard as soon as a vaccine was available.

I have yet to hear a cogent and convincing argument as to why COVID-19 is different from every other virus and every other pandemic. Why was it necessary to violate Constitutional rights and close down an economy, while censoring and ridiculing anyone who questions why?

The average age of COVID death is 78, while the average life expectancy is the same. Why should any healthy person be forced to take a vaccine where the recovery rate is 99.6%? Asking children to get vaccinated when effectively 0% of those under 18 with COVID die and the vast majority are asymptomatic is totally unnecessary.

There are far deadlier diseases than COVID that require nothing by way of vaccination. How about a bar code on the forehead, or is that too much Mark-of-the-Beast?

In a dichotomy of the times, many that are against voter ID covet vaccine passports. Showing an ID to vote supposedly suppresses. A digital vaccine passport would require downloading an app to your pricy phone to prove you received a vaccine for a virus that is no deadlier than influenza where you must be tested to know you contracted it.

While certain vaccines are required for overseas (ask any member of the Armed Forces) where some deadly diseases are more common, Americans have to understand such passports are being touted as a requirement for living within the land of the free.

The Patriot Act and other post-9/11 surveillance legislation by Washington that is arguably unconstitutional have been abused beyond their initial Orwellian reach. Recall how your Social Security number would be forbidden to be used outside of Social Security. Now picture a central vaccination database administered by Uncle Sam – what could possibly go wrong?

Since the length of vaccination efficacy is still unknown, when does your digital approval expire and who decides? What about those who possess natural immunities having recovered already?

This not only violates our Constitution, HIPPA laws, and liberty regarding decisions about one’s health. You must prove you are not the leper that everyone suspects. It is the equivalent of “guilty until proven innocent.” We should respect everyone’s wishes whether they want to get vaccinated or not. America was built on individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Vaccine passports is an anathema to our democratic principles and Constitutional rights. It is an insidious overreach allowing for bureaucrats to leverage fear and control the debate and push unconstitutional policies. This would serve to maintain the culture of shutdowns and restrictions, while violating one’s privacy, and act as a gateway for nefarious players for boundless abuse.

Requiring passports would endorse more political malfeasance in a society already drowning in it. The vaccine passport is not about easing restrictions but a coercive to vaccinate. It has nothing to do with health or the science, but everything to do with power and control.

It would place access in the hands of a bureaucrat akin to a Twitter or Facebook content reviewer. Passports will create another breed of identity politics that is destroying society by pitting brother against brother, friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor.

Noncompliance would give unelected bureaucrats power to discriminate and fashion another political identity class. For those who take the shot a somewhat pre-COVID life, but for those who refuse, repression of goods and services.

Americans are an autonomous people and would recoil at the thought of any restriction on our freedoms. Today, we just shrug and continue to scroll away on our phone masked up like a preteen on Halloween.

We all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

With every vaccine is informed consent. Passports would be coercion, not informed consent.

Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi have nixed vaccine passports.

The rest of the union needs to follow suit.

I have an idea. Something I learned from my cattle mentors in MT. Ear tags. We should place a certain color ear tag in everyone upon receiving their final vaccine shot. That way, we can see at a distance who is safe and who is not.  Those with the right colored ear tag need not wear a mask. So, if you meet up with someone who does not have the right ear tag and is not wearing a mask, you can shoot him/her. Right? I mean if we are going to force controls on our citizenship n preparation for us becoming a communist nation, no amount of force and coercion is unacceptable., and we need to get on with it. What do you think Joe?

 

Originally posted 2021-05-15 12:36:55.

Current Events

Toyota Warns (Again)

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About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

Folks, when Toyota speaks, GM had better listen before they find themselves coming to our table again asking for a bailout.  A friend of mine now retired, worked in a field where he became acquainted with several CEO’s, one of which was Alan Mullaly of Ford,  who by the way, is credited with saving Ford when GM, Chrysler et al went bust. Having lunch one day a few years ago, my friend asked Alan a hypothetical question, “Looking ahead ten years who will be the “Big Three?” Without hesitation Alan said, “Toyota, Volkswagen, and Ford.” I’ll not delve into Alan’s explanation as to why these three; let me only say, as a Economist, I agree it him.

While living in TN we belonged to an Newmar RV Klub. Someone arranged a trip for the Klub to visit the Toyota plant in Kentucky.  WOW, is all I can say. You could eat off the floor. The employees were cheerful, courteous, and happy. Several months prior the UAW came and asked to post signs around the plant announcing a meeting in a space the plant offered up to them.  This was the umpteenth time the UAW had come to them trying to get their employees to unionize. The plant was always courteous and offered space and time for the meeting..  The plant even allowed any employee time off to attend the meeting if it was during his/her shift. Of the then nearly 8,000 employees four showed up. If you buy Toyota, or Lexus, you are buying American; that plant now employs over 10,000 Americans.

BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring price tags down.The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternative current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

Bryan Preston served as chief of staff at the Texas Railroad Commissioner. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production in the Lone Star State, which is the nation’s top energy-producing state. He is the author of Hubble’s Revelations: The Amazing Time Machine and Its Most Important Discoveries. He’s a veteran and a Texan.

Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

Question is, will the others listen or think they are smarter? My bet is on the latter

Originally posted 2021-03-23 13:59:13.

Current Events

A COVID Christmas

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Please allow me to take this moment to say that I sincerely hope  all my blessed followers had a wonderfully merry Christmas regardless what your local dictators may have said. Mine said have a joyous Christmas with your families and friends, but then I consider myself fortunate by choice to have a sensible, for the people, Governor. My bride and I go to church every Sunday and then to a late breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants.  Life is good in Florida.

I will wish you a very happy new year if you can. I will not have a happy one as best as I can see into the near future. Our MSM wants you to believe 2020 was the worst ever. Well, don’t chalk it up to record books just yet for 2021 may prove to be a close competitor.

Here another thought provoking article from one of my favorite authors.

 

By: G. Maresca

 

American religiosity has been in decline for more than a generation and with the added fear of COVID-19, many Christian leaders have deserted their flocks.

Welcome to Christmas 2020, where the biggest crisis is not a virus but a lack of faith.

Church leaders have conceded to government diktats in this era of COVID-19 in a doleful attempt to brand themselves as benevolent.

The Constitutional right to freely worship, virus or not, was underscored with the recent Supreme Court ruling prohibiting arbitrary limits on church attendance.  Despite the court’s 5-4 decision, religious liberty has never been in more need of defense, especially when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and “political.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would have made attending Christmas midnight Mass, a criminal offense.  Perhaps Newsom would find Mass more acceptable if it were celebrated in the French Laundry restaurant – site of his crowded birthday party?  This is another example of directives made by the faithless affecting the faithful in the ongoing leftist agenda to secularize America.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be appalled how the church hierarchy has acquiesced to the state.  The state prohibits Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, yet liquor stores remain open.  Churches should have had the same rights as beer distributors, pot smokers and abortion clinics – all deemed essential.

Mandatory masking, overflowing hand sanitizer, and social distancing are in vogue in houses of worship, but what is missing are the children.  Churches will not survive without them.  Few in the pews are under age 50.  Sign-up sheets, roped off pews, and parking lot services did little to bring anyone back, let alone evangelize.

Limiting, or worse, cutting off sacramental grace from Christ’s mercy has only deepened the divide.  The science supporting lockdowns has failed to stop the spread, and may prove deadlier than the virus it was meant to heed.

If anything, COVID-19 underscores daily that no human endeavor can prevent our eventual death from any cause.

Any government that has the authority to restrict your livelihood, family gatherings, and houses of worship is worse than any virus.  The alternative is subservience, empty pews, and lost souls.

The COVID-19 generation may never come back.  The unrelenting attack on Christianity will never cease until the faithful stop kowtowing to tyrants.  Science isn’t going to save you and it is no coincidence Democrats are leading the charge.  What do you expect from a political party that has forced religious sisters to provide for contraception?   The left knows all too well that faith can be exorcised by breaking one’s spirit and will.

Too many politicos claiming to be Christian believe Jesus Christ came to put a chicken in every pot rather than to feed souls and offer salvation.  As long as a portion of a bishop’s budget is generated from government service contracts, towing the party line will be its low-hanging fruit.

Where are the bishops’ supernatural faith?

Where are today’s St. Thomas Mores, and St. Joan of Arc’s, or Fulton Sheens?

Prophetic voices must emanate among the bishops to speak truth to this abuse of government power.  As suicides and other mental health issues increase, we need more prayer, not less.  The secularist, dictatorial governors and mayors and designated so-called experts seeking to oppress worship reveal their contradictory priorities, daily.

Christmas is not the time to take counsel of your fears, but recall the hope that only a sincere faith provides.  Has there been a year in living memory when the Christmas promise is in such demand?  The reason for the season is here, and never leaves.  Jesus was born during one of the darkest periods in human history as the Roman Empire begot moral depravity on an unparalleled scale.  Our Lord did so by entering the world in the humblest of ways to show He will go anywhere when invited.

In a remarkable sign, Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths this past week appearing as one body in the night sky.  They were closer than they have been in nearly eight centuries and was labeled the “Christmas Star.”

Many need to heed the message the angels announced that first Christmas: Fear not!

The child whose birth we celebrate is Emmanuel, “God with Us.”

If God is with us, who can be against us?

 

Originally posted 2020-12-26 10:26:05.

Current Events

Are you a “Forgotten Man”?

8 Comments

Good question posed by the WSJ; are you one? I know I am, and I am praying the “Forgotten Man” comes alive again in two weeks!

The 2020 Election: The Final Days, or Will It Be Weeks?

After the initial shock of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory wore off, a few thoughtful people across the ideological spectrum attempted to wrap their heads around what happened. How did a brash, sometimes crude political neophyte beat everyone from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton at their own game on the world’s largest stage? Those more prone to introspection and self-awareness than denial and vindictiveness came to the conclusion that the country’s political and media elites had forgotten about the plight of the “average” American—the so-called Forgotten Man.

The term, first coined by Yale social scientist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), was used to describe the American who, too poor to have political influence and too rich to be considered worthy of a helping hand, was often taken for granted by the political classes. As Sumner so aptly noted, “he works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays.”

There was a post-2016 awakening among those who realized they had ignored a big part of the country—the one that lives far from the corridors of power and the bright lights of cable television studios. Those who hadn’t read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” before the election rushed to buy a copy. For a while, everyone seemed to understand the hidden pain of those in the so-called Rust Belt of the American Midwest who had paid the highest price for 50 years of social engineering at home and abroad.

The costs of trade and immigration policies that favored big business were most often felt by the working class in “flyover country.” These policy changes came at a pace so rapid that people had little chance to adapt. Those same families sent their sons and daughters to fight in far off wars with few obvious connections to the national interest.

Those who complained were either ignored or deemed xenophobic racists and “deplorables.” How dare they question the collective wisdom of highly educated experts? Never mind that those experts bore almost no consequences for the disastrous effects of their policies. To my knowledge, no politician, university professor, news anchor, military officer, or Wall Street titan has ever seen his job outsourced to a foreign land.

From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, critical perspective and analysis on developments from Washington

Originally posted 2020-10-19 11:55:19.

Current Events

America’s Chris Wallace Problem

8 Comments
Is anything more dangerous to our country than media bias?
I doubt it. Chris Wallace is an arrogant, egotistical smartass who should never have been allowed to moderate a presidential debate. He is as sneaky as a lizard, and that’s what makes him so dangerous to the world of respected journalism. Mr. McCain spells out just one example of how he posed questions to Trump. Disgusting Wallace, you piece of garbage.
Robert Stacy McCain
by 
October 2, 2020, 12:37 AM
Chris Wallace on Fox News yesterday (YouTube screenshot)
When will Chris Wallace apologize to Katie Pavlich? More than once, Wallace has insulted his Fox News colleague on the network, as in a January segment about the impeachment of President Trump, when Wallace barked at Pavlich, “Get your facts straight!” As it turned out in that case, Pavlich was right and Wallace was wrong — and not accidentally so. The question at issue was Democrats’ demand that the Senate trial over what was called “Ukrainegate” include testimony from additional witnesses. Pavlich said this was unprecedented, and contended it was not the Senate’s fault that “the House did not come with a complete case.” Wallace began barking about “facts” in an attempt to rescue Democrats from the consequences of their failure.

Why did Wallace use his position as moderator of a presidential debate to parrot Gov. Brown’s rhetoric by claiming that “white supremacists and militia groups” were somehow to blame for the Portland riots?

Wallace’s dismal performance as moderator in Tuesday’s presidential debate reminded many viewers of such previous instances in which the Fox News Sunday host has shown his prejudice against Trump. And this matters, not only because of how that ugly televised carnival might affect the election, but because of what it tells us about the sad state of journalism in America. If Wallace is, Dov Fischer says, “the fairest moderator we can hope for in today’s Left-dominated media,” there is no hope for fairness. But what about those “facts” that Wallace presumed to lecture Katie Pavlich about? Even if we must resign ourselves to partisan prejudice from the media, must we tolerate journalists trafficking in outright lies?

That’s what Wallace did in Tuesday’s debate. Consider this question he aimed at President Trump: “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups, but are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”

Where is the evidence that “white supremacists and militia groups” were to blame for violence in Kenosha or Portland, Oregon? Wallace’s question was not only tendentious, but counterfactual. As regards Portland, Wallace seemed to be echoing Oregon’s woefully misguided Democratic governor. After a man who described himself as “100% Antifa” murdered a Trump supporter on the streets of Portland Aug.29, Gov. Kate Brown issued this rather bizarre statement:

As elected officials and community leaders, we are coming together to condemn the acts of violence in Portland that have occurred as thousands of Oregonians have been peacefully protesting for racial justice and police accountability. The violence must stop. There is no place for white supremacy or vigilantism in Oregon. All who perpetrate violent crimes must be held equally accountable. Together, we are committing ourselves to do the hard work that will bring meaningful change for racial justice and police reform.

What did the murder of Trump supporter Aaron “Jay” Danielson have to do with “racial justice”? Danielson was white, but so was the Antifa radical who shot him to death, Michael Reinoehl. As for holding those “who perpetrate violent crimes … equally accountable,” why did Gov. Brown let Antifa wreak havoc in Portland for more than three months before deciding that violence is bad? Where is the evidence that “white supremacy” played any role in Portland’s anti-police riots?

More importantly, however, why did Chris Wallace use his position as moderator of a presidential debate to parrot Gov. Brown’s rhetoric by claiming that “white supremacists and militia groups” were somehow to blame for the Portland riots? Such a claim is not journalism but political propaganda, and that goes doubly so for what happened in Kenosha. In case you’ve been hiding in a cave for the past five weeks, riots erupted in this Wisconsin city on Aug. 23 after a police officer shot a black man, Jacob Blake, who had violated a restraining order and had a warrant against him on sexual assault charges. On the first night of what the national media insisted on calling “mostly peaceful protests” the BLM mob “hurled debris, smashed windows,” and set fire to the Kenosha County Courthouse and several vehicles.

The next morning, the Biden campaign issued a statement that declared, “We must dismantle systemic racism. It is the urgent task before us.” The BLM mob apparently took Biden’s words as a command to “dismantle” Kenosha. On the second night of riots in the city, the arsonists torched a car dealership, a furniture store, and a state Department of Corrections office, among other targets. Perhaps Chris Wallace can explain how “white supremacists and militia groups” were responsible for this violence, but probably what he had in mind were the events of the third night of the Kenosha riots. That was when a convicted child rapist named Joseph Don “JoJo” Rosenbaum attacked 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse.

By the way, has Chris Wallace ever mentioned Rosenbaum’s criminal record on Fox News? He considers himself authorized to lecture others about how important to “get your facts straight,” why wouldn’t he want to share with Fox News viewers the fact that Rosenbaum was convicted of raping five pre-teen boys in Tucson? The story of what happened in Kenosha on the night of Aug. 25 doesn’t make sense if you don’t know that the man who attacked Rittenhouse was a very dangerous criminal who had served more than a decade in Arizona prisons.

Rosenbaum was captured on video that night taunting a group of armed men who were guarding a Kenosha business against the angry mob: “Shoot me n****!” When Rosenbaum later set a fire, Rittenhouse ran with a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze. Video shows Rosenbaum chasing the teenager across a parking lot where he cornered him, and Rittenhouse fired in self-defense, fatally wounding his attacker. As I explained last month (“The Media Lynching of Kyle Rittenhouse,” Sept. 3), Rosenbaum’s attack set off the chain of events in which two other rioters were shot, after the angry mob chased Rittenhouse. An 11-minute video produced by attorneys for Rittenhouse clearly shows that the teenager acted in self-defense.

Contrary to what Chris Wallace asserted to a TV audience of millions of Americans during Tuesday’s debate, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a “white supremacist,” nor is he a member of any “militia group.” That was made clear in a report Thursday by two young Wisconsin contributors to the Federalist, Evita Duffy and Kylee Zempel, who were on the scene in Kenosha during the riots:

Robert Stacy McCain is the author of Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature. He blogs at TheOtherMcCain.com.

Originally posted 2020-10-02 12:23:35.