June 28, 2022

I guess brown lifes don't matter either


50 migrants dead after being found inside sweltering semitruck in San Antonio, with more hospitalized
By Amy Simonson, Amanda Musa, Travis Caldwell and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Updated 3:01 PM ET, Tue June 28, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/27/us/san-antonio-migrants-found-truck/index.html

Biden’s policies are a mess AND put many innocents at risk and allow Mexican cartels to get rich.

I support immigration. A lot of immigration. But legal immigration, with a mix of merit based  (engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, mathematicians, etc.) and opportunity-based (poor people who want to work hard, adopt American values, and get ahead). 

(Note-The numbers are the apprehensions. We do not know how many people get through without being apprehended)






June 27, 2022

I guess black lives really don’t matter



Where’s the outrage? Where’s BLM? Where’s Lebron?

Another week and more lives lost. Until the Democrats stop propagating the false narrative nothing will change.

Black lives matter - I support the words but cannot support the organization because it propagates the false narrative that systemic racism is the primary cause of the disparities(murders, incarceration, teen mothers, fatherless households, income, wealth, etc.) between blacks and whites.

Racism exists (though not widespread), it’s bad, and we should continue to work to reduce it. Excess police force exists (though rare), it's  bad and we should continue to work to reduce it.

BLM organization’s positions and policies do not address the problems (murders, fatherless households, teen pregnancy, lack of agency) and do not address the key root causes (it’s not excessive police force or systemic racism.) 



https://moxlosllc.blogspot.com/2021/10/wheres-biden-lebron-blm-102521.html


Abortion



While from a personal point of view, with only daughters and sisters, I have always ended up, when push came to shove, where I wanted women to be able to make the decision, I have always understood that it is a difficult issue to decide if/when a fetus has some rights AND that many Constitutional scholars, including Ginsburg, have indicated that Roe and Casey stood on weak constitutional grounds.

My view and understanding (see below) is that SCOTUS made an accurate Constitutional ruling, regardless of my preferences or thoughts related to morals, and that they have returned the issue to the legislatures.  Also, as best as I can tell, in all States women will have the right to an abortion if the mother's life is in danger.

RULING REVIEW 

Casey (which modified Roe) essentially limited a woman’s right to an abortion after viability (not defined) to instances where the mother’s life is in danger.

SCOTUS decided that Casey (and Roe) were not Constitutional because the Constitution is silent on abortion, that there was not a universal recognized right to an abortion at the time the Constitution was passed, and that the right to an abortion cannot be an unenumerated right BECAUSE an abortion affects a fetus and there is great disagreement in society as to what rights, if any, a fetus has at what point.

They indicated that it is not Constitutional for SCOTUS to decide what rights, if any, a fetus has at what point and that it is up to the legislatures (Federal and/or State) to make this decision for the people that they represent.

Note that in the EU, for the most part, countries’ Legislatures, not Courts, limit a woman’s right to an abortion after 12 weeks to instances where the mother’s life is in danger.

The expected result is that if and until a Federal law is passed, that abortion limits will be left to the states and range from unlimited abortion at any time, even 9 months, to no abortions except in the cases that threaten the mother’s life.  
  1. All states are expected to allow abortions if the mother’s life is at risk
  2. Few states with limits have an exception for rape or incest.
  3. Most states will allow the use of Plan B (morning after pill).  There is a serious doubt as to the legality of the handful of states that are trying to limit the use of Plan B
  4. The majority of the majority opinion also made it clear that because abortion affects a fetus with whatever rights it may or may not have, abortion is not the same as other unenumerated rights such as gay marriage, birth control, etc. and there is no reason to think that this court would eliminate the later

 

June 22, 2022

Russia Rubbles - Biden Dithers

Russia continues to make incremental progress in taking over Eastern Ukraine through the use of massive artillery barrages, rubbling Ukraine towns and villages.

Biden continues to stingily increase the amount and effectiveness of US military aid but, to date, Russian firepower is overwhelming compared to Ukraine.  Russia fires 50,000 artillery rounds per day while Ukraine can manage 5000.  Not hard to imagine how this will end up.  

Putin doesn't care about Ukraine civilians or infrastructure and will continue to destroy Ukraine until he is stopped.

There is also a coming disaster as 100's of millions are at risk of starvation because the important grains of Ukraine cannot be transported due to Russian blockade.  

The US is the world's superpower and needs to LEAD these efforts.






June 21, 2022

Way to go Joe




This will not help inflation or US competitiveness

Biden Administration pro­posing to im­pose manda­tory dis­clo­sure re­quire­ments con­cern­ing cli­mate risks and green­house-gas emis­sions, say­ing it poses height­ened le­gal li­a­bil­ity, hefty costs and re­port­ing bur­dens  this part of Biden‘s green agenda that greatly increases costs today more than the benefits that will happen much later.

Biden Administration en­dorses a House bill that would add racial eq­uity to the Fed’s dual man­date of price sta­bil­ity and full em­ploy­ment. Forcing equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity based on a false narrative of systemic racism being the primary cause of disparities will hurt not help.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-skewer-secs-climate-disclosures-plan-in-comment-letters-11655834912

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-woke-mandate-for-the-federal-reserve-racial-equity-congress-house-joe-biden-11655659047?st=8for50zvzggkqun&reflink=article_copyURL_share


June 16, 2022

Biden Stopping Oil

Biden still not trying to increase oil production. 


https://link.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/white-house-responds-to-more-us-oil-drilling-we-dont-need-to-do-that_4538421.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/chevron-hits-back-says-biden-trying-impose-obstacles-energy-delivery


Despite President Biden’s claims that he’s doing everything he can to fight inflation, it’s clear he’s not.

Looking only at oil and gas production in the US, we see that we are still far behind the trend we were on before the pandemic.

Little doubt that Biden‘s anti-fossil fuel policies are negatively impacting supply, resulting in higher prices.

April 2022 Interior Secretary Deb Haaland “we continue to appeal the court injunction requiring us to allow leases and permits and I have used my authority to reduce by 80 precent the areas to lease, impose stringent environmental safeguards, and ensure the American people receive their fair share.”  

May 2022 - Biden administration imposed much higher carbon cost standard in review process

Biden fighting wrong war


Instead of decisively helping Ukraine defeat Russia by sending more weapons with more capabilities sooner rather than later Biden focuses his efforts on forcing the country to allow children to have irreversible life altering surgery  

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-directs-hhs-to-expand-access-to-transgender-care-including-for-children


By 

Five sentences sum up the war in Ukraine as it stands now.

The Russians are running out of precision-guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of patience for the war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chinese are watching.

Moscow’s shortfalls with its arsenal, which have been obvious on the battlefield for weeks, are cause for long-term relief and short-term horror. Relief, because the Russian war machine, on whose modernization Vladimir Putin spent heavily, has been exposed as a paper tiger that could not seriously challenge NATO in a conventional conflict.

Horror, because an army that cannot wage a high-tech war, relatively low on collateral damage, will wage a low-tech war, appallingly high on such damage. Ukraine, by its own estimates, is suffering 20,000 casualties a month. By contrast, the U.S. suffered about 36,000 casualties in Iraq over seven years of war. For all its bravery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neighbor more than three times its size in a war of attrition.

That means Ukraine needs to do more than slow down the Russian Army. It needs to break its spine as quickly as possible.

But that can’t happen in an artillery war when Russia can fire some 60,000 shells per dayagainst the roughly 5,000 that the Ukrainians have said they can get off. Quantity, as the saying goes, has a quality all its own. The Biden administration is providing Ukraine with advanced howitzers, rocket launchers and munitions, but they aren’t arriving fast enough.

Now is the moment for Joe Biden to tell his national security team what Richard Nixon told his when Israel was reeling from its losses in the Yom Kippur War: After asking what weapons Jerusalem was asking for, the 37th president ordered his staff to “double it,” adding, “Now get the hell out of here and get the job done.”

The urgency of winning soon — or at least of putting Russian forces into retreat across a broad front, so that it’s Moscow, not Kyiv, that sues for peace — is compounded by the fact that time isn’t necessarily on the West’s side.

Sanctions on Russia may do long-term damage to its capacity to grow. But sanctions can do only so much in the short term to dent Russia’s capacity to destroy. Those same sanctions also exact a toll on the rest of the world, and the toll the world is prepared to pay for solidarity with Ukraine isn’t unlimited. Critical shortages of foodenergy and fertilizer, along with the supply disruptions and price increases that inevitably follow, can’t be sustained forever in democratic societies with limited tolerance for pain.

Meanwhile, Putin appears to be paying no great price, whether in energy revenues (which are up, thanks to price increases) or in public support (also up, thanks to some combination of nationalism, propaganda and fear), for his war. Hoping he might die soon of whatever disease might be ailing him — Is it Parkinson’s? A “blood cancer”? Or just a Napoleon complex? — isn’t a strategy.

What more can the Biden administration do? It needs to take two calculated risks, based on one conceptual breakthrough.

The calculated risks: First, as retired Adm. James Stavridis has proposed, the U.S. should be prepared to challenge the Russian maritime blockade of Odesa by escorting cargo ships to and from the port.

That will first mean getting Turkey to allow NATO warships to transit the Turkish straits to the Black Sea, which could entail some uncomfortable diplomatic concessions to Ankara. More dangerously, it could result in close encounters between NATO and Russian warships. But Russia has no legal right to blockade Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to keep Ukrainian farm products from reaching global markets, and not enough maritime might to take on the U.S. Navy.

Second, the U.S. should seize the estimated $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held abroad to fund Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.

I first proposed this in early April, and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Jeremy Lewin laid out a convincing legal case several days later in a Times guest essay. The administration has cold feet on grounds that it could violate U.S. law and set a bad financial precedent — which would be good arguments in less dire circumstances. Right now, what’s urgently needed is the kind of financial wallop to Russia that other sanctions have failed to inflict.

Which brings us to the conceptual breakthrough: The fight in Ukraine will have a greater effect in Asia than it will in Europe. The administration may reassure itself that it has sufficiently bloodied the Russian military that it won’t soon be invading anyone else. That’s true as far as it goes.

But if the war ends with Putin comfortably in power and Russia in possession of a fifth of Ukraine, then Beijing will draw the lesson that aggression works. And we will have a fight over Taiwan — with its overwhelming human and economic toll — much sooner than we think.

The bottom line: The war in Ukraine is either a prelude or a finale. President Biden needs to do even more than he already has to ensure it’s the latter.

June 1, 2022

CDC Unmasked


Last year the CDC used a widely criticized study to recommend  that children continue to wear masks in school.

Now, the University of Toronto has shown that the study that the CDC used was indeed flawed because of the limited abound of data used and it’s lack of inclusion of important variables. 

The University of Toronto replicated the CDC study but with a much larger and more meaningful data set. The results? No significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates. These results persisted when using regression methods to control for differences across districts.

“School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval. Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables”

Biden lacks energy

Despite President Biden’s claims that he’s doing everything he can to fight inflation, it’s clear he’s not.

Looking only at oil and gas production in the US, we see that we are still far behind the trend we were on before the pandemic.

Little doubt that Biden‘s anti-fossil fuel policies are negatively impacting supply, resulting in higher prices.

April 2022 Interior Secretary Deb Haaland “we continue to appeal the court injunction requiring us to allow leases and permits and I have used my authority to reduce by 80 precent the areas to lease, impose stringent environmental safeguards, and ensure the American people receive their fair share.”  

May 2022 - Biden administration imposed much higher carbon cost standard in review process

Ineffectual

US President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that  the US will not aid any Israeli counterattack on Iran , US media report,...