Month: May 2021

Voter Suppression?

Before we get to today’s topic. I want to say that inflation like you have never experienced will be eating your wallet. There are consequences when a government continues to print money. The money supply is higher now than any time in recent history. It’s going to get grim.

An article with facts to counter continuing lies.

Voter Suppression? As the Duke would have said “Not hardly”.

‘We have classic voter suppression,” declared Kamala Harris last fall, and Democrats keep making the charge. Yet new Census voting data show these claims are as meritless as Donald Trump’s that the election was stolen.

Census figures released Thursday show that turnout in 2020 reached a near-historic high for a presidential election, with 66.8% of voting-age citizens casting ballots—0.9 percentage-points shy of the 1992 record.

Turnout was 5.4 percentage-points higher than in 2016, and 3.2 points higher than in 2008 when Barack Obama drove scores of young people and minorities to the polls. The share of Hispanics (53.7%) and Asians (59.7%) of voting age who cast ballots also hit new peaks. Black voting (62.6%) surpassed any presidential year save 2008 and 2012.

Notably, GOP states with stricter voting rules didn’t experience significantly lower minority turnout. Black turnout was highest in Maryland (75.3%) followed by Mississippi (72.8%) and lowest in Massachusetts (36.4%). Liberals have lambasted Georgia for “purging” voters and restricting ballot access. But Georgia had a smaller black-white voting gap than Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia and California—all states controlled by Democrats.

The states with the biggest black-white voting gaps? Massachusetts, Oregon, Wisconsin, Iowa and Colorado. Three allow same-day voter registration (Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Good luck trying to discern a link between a state’s voting rules, partisan control and minority turnout.

Perhaps no state has done more to make it easier to vote than California. It allows same-day registration, ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting. Arizona doesn’t allow any of these practices, yet it had higher turnout among all minority groups and smaller voting disparities with whites than California.

The Supreme Court has heard a case this term brought by Democrats challenging Arizona’s ban on ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting. Democrats claim without evidence that Arizona’s rules disproportionately affect minorities and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 2020 election shows otherwise.

Democrats also say the Supreme Court unleashed voter suppression by striking down a Voting Rights Act provision that allowed the Justice Department to block changes to voting rules in states with histories of discrimination. But the high minority turnout in states like Georgia and Mississippi reaffirms the Court’s ruling that the provision was outdated.

Democrats know their complaints are false, but they repeat them to energize apathetic voters. The top reasons Americans gave for not voting last fall: Not interested (17.6%), did not like candidates/campaign issues (14.5%), too busy/conflicting schedule (13.1%) and forgot (13%). Few cited an inconvenient polling place (2.6%) or registration problems (4.9%). Differences across racial groups were small.

Myriad factors including the candidates, a person’s political and civic engagement as well as education are bigger determinants of voting than the ease of casting a ballot. Cynicism fed by politicians of both parties may also disillusion would-be voters. The good news is that most voters don’t see voter suppression—and their turnout proves it.

Wall Street Journal – May 4, 2021

If you can handle a long article on what’s wrong with our culture read this one by Mark Steyn Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization

The Man’s Choice

BTW, other bloggers, the ones that have no love for OBB. I sometimes notice when you repost pictures from here. Yes, I often put watermarks on them so small you don’t notice them. Ditto on themes. I post an odd non-spanking topic and the next week so do you. I am gratified.

 

OK, Guys, pick your spanker. Should be one for everyone. I am choosing the first one.

A variation on the post a few weeks back titled The French. We still have a maid and a martinet, but a man is being flogged.

Seven Thoughts

Whatever you believe you might be wrong.
Bill Clinton
Edit, added today: AOC wants a Civilian Climate Corps. (CCC get it) A diverse group of 1.5 million Americans over five years will complete federally-funded projects that help communities respond to climate change. To be paid a minimum of $15 an hour and full health benefits.
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Corporations don’t pay taxes. They are vehicles for collecting taxes that are ultimately paid by some combination of customers in higher prices, workers in lower wages, and shareholders in lower returns on investment.
Lower corporate tax rates result in higher wages. Higher after-tax profits mean more corporate investment, which means more productive workers, whom companies can afford to pay more.
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Mohammedanism
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.”
Churchill – The River War
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Disaffection, racism and misogyny – Really?
Former President Barack Obama released a statement on the Boulder shooting saying recent killings are being driven by “disaffection, racism and misogyny” — despite Colorado officials identifying the gunman who slaughtered 10 inside a grocery store as mentally ill.
The shooters brother told the Daily Beast he was “very anti-social” and suffered from paranoia and possible mental illness.
But other recent mass shootings were committed out of religious zeal — which went unmentioned by Obama — by radicalized Muslim Americans whose families recently immigrated to the United States.
Barack Obama has been labeled ‘a racial arsonist’ by Tucker Carlson, with the Fox News host accusing the former president of emerging only to foment societal tension. Carlson said that the former president ‘took a break from becoming one of the richest men in the world’ to weigh in.  ‘More than any other contemporary American leader, Barack Obama is a racial arsonist,’ said Carlson. ‘He emerges at our most vulnerable moments to deepen the wounds that divide us. He sows hate.’
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Fallacies
“One of the most common fallacies is so old that it has a Latin name from centuries ago: Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc—in other words, “After this, therefore because of this.” For example, one of the damning claims against the insecticide DDT, during the successful campaign to get it banned in many parts of the world, was that it caused cancer. In places where DDT had been widely used, cancer rates had in fact gone up. Many of these were countries subject to devastating ravages of malaria, which killed off vast numbers of people. In the wake of using DDT, which killed mosquitoes that transmitted malaria, that disease was drastically reduced, almost to the vanishing point in some places. Now millions of people, who would otherwise have died young, lived long enough to get cancer in their later years. But the DDT did not cause cancer, and its banning led to a resurgence of malaria that took millions of lives around the world.”
— Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition by Thomas Sowell
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Annoy The Annointed
Those things that help human beings be independent and self-reliant—whether automobiles, guns, the free market, or vouchers—provoke instant hostility from the anointed.”
— The Thomas Sowell Reader by Thomas Sowell
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Shut Up
“What each of these thinkers wanted from authority was an argument-ender that would cut off debate and silence disagreement. They wanted something that, in the liberal view, would shut down politics itself, because politics to liberals meant unending dispute in a diverse society. The liberal side of Burkeanism could eventually come to terms with that picture of politics as argument.”
— Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition by Edmund Fawcett
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Plain Reason
“There cannot be anything so disingenuous, so misbecoming a gentleman or anyone who pretends to be a rational creature, as not to yield to plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments.—JOHN LOCKE
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Potpourri

 

Another mashup of images that don’t have a darn thing to do with each other.

This picture of a woman in a fuzzy dress gets me excited. I never missed a chance to chat up a lass wearing one.

Tanlines

A reader is kind to send me pictures from time-to-time. She has eyeballs!

Julia Child Uses The Ruler

She has a talent, but fails the landing

Sorority fun. There is usually a guy in the pictures.

Screams 70s

I Got Your Clean Energy Right Here

If spending trillions will not get the world green, ask yourself where will the money go? Who will benefit?

This appeared in the Wall Street Journal May 13.

The International Energy Agency, the world’s pre-eminent source of energy information for governments, has entered the political debate over whether the U.S. should spend trillions of dollars to accelerate the energy transition favored by the Biden administration. You know, the plan to use far more “clean energy” and far less hydrocarbons—the oil, natural gas and coal that today supply 84% of global energy needs. The IEA’s 287-page report released this month, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” is devastating to those ambitions. A better title would have been: “Clean Energy Transitions: Not Soon, Not Easy and Not Clean.”

The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,” or ETMs, that must be mined and processed. The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.

The world doesn’t have the capacity to meet such demand. As the IEA observes, albeit in cautious bureaucratese, there are no plans to fund and build the necessary mines and refineries. The supply of ETMs is entirely aspirational. And if it were pursued at the quantities dictated by the goals of the energy transition, the world would face daunting environmental, economic and social challenges, along with geopolitical risks.

The IEA stipulates up front one underlying fact that advocates of a transition never mention: Green-energy machines use far more critical minerals than conventional-energy machines do. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant,” the report says. “Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.” That was merely to bring wind and solar to a 10% share of the world’s electricity.

As the IEA notes dryly, the transition is a “shift from a fuel-intensive to a material-intensive energy system.” That means a shift away from liquids and gases whose extraction and transport leave a very light footprint on the land and are transported easily, cheaply and efficiently, and toward big-footprint mines, the energy-intensive transport of massive amounts of rocks and other solid materials, and subsequent chemical processing and refining.

Spooling up production can’t happen overnight. The IEA observes something every miner knows: “It has taken on average over 16 years to move mining projects from discovery to first production.” Start tomorrow and new ETM production will begin only after 2035. This is a considerable problem for the Biden administration’s plan to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035.

In what may become the understatement of the decade, the IEA concludes that such long lead times “raise questions about the ability of suppliers to ramp up output if demand were to pick up rapidly.” The conditional “if” is a discordant qualifier given the IEA itself has endorsed, and nearly all its member states have already pledged, a rapid transition. The clear consequence is that “deployment of clean energy technologies is set to supercharge demand for critical minerals.”

Credit the IEA for acknowledging that this will require a global mining boom that leaves in its wake all manner of environmental implications. “Mining and mineral processing require large volumes of water”—a serious issue when around half of global lithium and copper production takes place in areas of high water stress—and “pose contamination risks through acid mine drainage, wastewater discharge and the disposal of tailings.”

The IEA falls backs on the usual admonition that mitigating these risks will require “strengthening international collaboration” for everything from pollution to labor practices. But the history here isn’t promising. IEA data show that expanded ETM mining will occur mainly in countries with “low governance scores” where “corruption and bribery pose major liability risks.”

The IEA may be the first major agency to flag the geopolitical risks of the energy transition, again with copious data. Today the oil-and-gas market is characterized by supply diversity. The top three producers, among them the U.S., account for less than half of world supply. The top three producers for three key ETMs, however, control more than 80% of global supply. Here we find China utterly dominant while the U.S. isn’t even a player.

Well buried in the report is a warning about the “high emissions intensities” of ETMs. Energy use per pound mined is even trending up. This is no arcane nuance. It’s the key hidden factor that determines whether, or to what extent, a clean-energy machine actually reduces carbon-dioxide emissions on net. The IEA data show that, depending on the location and nature of future mines, the emissions from obtaining ETMs could wipe out much or most of the emissions saved by driving electric cars.

Worse yet, radical increases in demand will raise commodity prices, which reverberate throughout the global economy. When it comes to batteries, the IEA notes this could “eat up” the anticipated reductions in manufacturing costs expected from the “learning effects” of increased production. It’s an outcome that runs counter to the narrative of inevitably cheaper green-energy machines over time.

If such a report had come from a pro-hydrocarbon organization, the group would be dismissed, if not canceled outright. Credit the IEA for boldly going where few policy makers have gone before. As President Obama might say, we can’t dig our way out of this problem.

Mr. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, and author of “The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s,” forthcoming in October.

The First 100 Days

Policies of de facto open borders, blanket amnesties, cancellations of pipelines and fossil fuel leases, planned radical increases in corporate, income, and capital gains taxes, identity politics and Green New Deal rhetoric, along with his appointments and resets in the Middle East, are the most left-wing agendas since [Franklin D. Roosevelt]. Their common denominators are utopian globalism, redistributionism, criticism of America’s founding, traditions, history, and values, and identity-politics tribalism.  VDH

No Education

Ever wonder where the young ones get ideas that defy all logic? From professors. This website features some of the more egregious. Pick a few and see what they think and what they teach instead of knowledge.

Schools want to teach critical race theory rather than accelerated math. They probably are not qualified to teach math.

Reparations? If any group is liable to Blacks for enslaving them it would be the Islamists. And since they enslaved whites as well as blacks, I am due compensation.