As you have undoubtedly noticed, the price of gasoline has risen sharply since January and heating bills are expected to jump by as much as 54% this winter.
The cause is Economics 101: inadequate supply is driving up price. In fact, one of President Biden’s senior energy advisors has acknowledged this and called on non-American producers to increase supply.
President Biden himself has repeatedly begged OPEC+ to increase supply by drilling more – most recently and incongruously, during the AGW conference in Glasgow. His pleas have been rebuffed.
But wait, the United States has lots of oil. What about that? President Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about that exact point on November 5 by Bloomberg media’s Tom Keene. In response, Granholm laughed uproariously at Keene’s suggestion that the US increase oil production in America, actually calling it “hilarious”. (Wonder if people steeling themselves to order heating oil find hilarity in the situation.) She went on to pretend that the United States has no oil of its own.
As you know, of course, oil is a global market. It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is called OPEC and they made the decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning.
Hoo hah! My sides! (… this is where I laugh, right??)
Almost simultaneous with begging OPEC+ to increase production, President Biden announced that his administration would tighten the regulatory stranglehold on domestic fossil fuels, new sources (“carbon bomb” – cool) and existing. The effect of this, as he, or at least, whoever is moving his lips and pen knows, will be to strangle supply further and exacerbate the rising price of fossil fuels.
President Biden, of course, killed an American pipeline on his first day in office then, paradoxically, four months later, greenlighted a non-American pipeline.
The green in Secretary Granholm’s blazer, along with the cancelling of the XL pipeline and the intended new supply-choking regulations, is virtue-signaling by the Biden/Harris admin to environmental extremists. But don’t non-American sourced fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases just like American ones do? Does the Biden/Harris admin think the environmentalists don’t know this?
More to the point, the Biden/Harris admin clearly sees the need to increase supply to ease prices. This is the correct goal, inasmuch as the United States only generates 11% of manmade greenhouse gases (wonder if Secretary Granholm finds humor in that datapoint) so the impact of our going to zero emissions would be negligible at best, even stipulating that manmade greenhouse gases have any effect on the climate. Accordingly, I ask honestly: why do they preclude domestic drilling and fracking to accomplish this?
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PhD pharmacist Nadia Archambault joins host Darlene D’Arezzo to discuss the differences between marijuana and CBD, their uses, and their effects on the human condition and development. She is very candid when she shares her concerns and offers cautions about use, drug source, and more.
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Dr. Tim Shafman on lung cancer
Dr. Stephen Skoly on the loss of medical license due to the vaccine mandate
Laurie Gaddis Barrett on the school mask mandate lawsuit
Major Wayne Morse
Featured image by the National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
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As he so often does, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds states briefly a key takeaway from the media and public handling of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial:
[Open full post]The goal of the left is to create an environment in which its people are encouraged to be violent without consequences, while their victims are denied the right to respond.
Unfortunately, the unusual thing about the latest off-campus attack of a Providence College student is not the attack itself. Here’s what happened, as reported by Sarah Doiron and Matt Paddock for WPRI:
The Minnesota native’s father, Anthony, who asked that his daughter not be identified out of concern for her safety, said she was walking home from a school-sponsored event last Friday night when she was jumped by two females. …
Anthony said the suspects destroyed his daughter’s phone before pinning her down and slamming her head into the ground.
What’s unusual is that it takes the father, with his clear Midwestern eye, to bring up city authorities: “Why haven’t there been any arrests in these assaults?” All the journalists manage to add is: “police confirmed they are investigating the incident.”
That’s it? No questions about what the police are doing to prevent this trend from continuing or getting worse? It’s as if the local news media is too afraid of landing on the wrong side of the defund-the-police faction (or too much in sympathy with it) to imply that police should be doing more, particularly when doing more would mean taking the side of putatively privileged college students.
Even more peculiar is a specific name that does not appear in the article: Jorge Elorza… you know, the mayor of the city in which violence is escalating. The impression one gets is that he simply doesn’t matter now that he’s declared he’s no longer in the race for governor. What made him newsworthy was not that he is the chief executive of the state’s capital, whose successes and failures in office affect millions of people. No, all that matters is his role in the horse race of politics.
Maybe he could still matter if his actions advanced or impeded the political causes near and dear to the progressive media’s hearts, but those causes cut in opposition to simply making the city function for the people who live, work, and learn there.
The strangeness of the story, then, is that it exposes just how dysfunctional our entire civil society is — so dysfunctional, in fact, that anybody whose ideas and competence could help improve things would, for that reason, find it extremely difficult to attract any notice at all… at least any positive notice.
Featured image from Bing Maps.
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If you’ve followed political punditry much over the past couple decades, you know how significant it is that Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan are both questioning the conclusion drawn from a recent Center for American Progress survey:
A recent nationally representative survey conducted by the Center for American Progress found that LGBTQI+ members of Generation Z face higher levels of discrimination in areas including housing, school, and the workforce than previous generations report. According to the survey, this heightened discrimination results in higher rates of financial struggles, mental health issues and avoidance behaviors among LGBTQI+ Gen Zers. Comprehensive solutions at the federal level, such as the Equality Act, are urgently needed to address the discrimination these young people face and allow them to live their lives fully.
The progressive Yglesias writes:
This is surely telling us more about the respondents than about an actual increase in anti-gay discrimination — I remember the 1990s!
And the less-definable Sullivan:
In many ways, this suggests a crisis in gay America. The youngest generation seems incapable of thriving. Despite unprecedented acceptance and legal equality. The woke are poisoning the young.
This discussion belongs in the same folder as a John Murawski RealClearInvestigations article with the descriptive headline, “Medical Research Rapidly Adopts ‘Systemic Racism’ as Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility“:
Systemic racism, generally unseen but known by its perceived effects, doesn’t directly cause diabetes, hypertension or depression, but it purportedly creates the living conditions in which chronic conditions opportunistically thrive, advocates say. Such living conditions include unsafe neighborhoods, aggressive policing, substandard schools, discriminatory workplaces, inferior medical care and the resulting stress, despair and self-destructive behavior, the theory states.
Being on a very different topic, that article has broader implications and deserves additional review in the near future. Our purposes, here, however, produce two relevant questions.
The first is whether it serves any purpose (including bringing us closer to the truth) to package these effects under some identity-politics “ism.” Maybe it will help, but the case has to be made. It could be, for example, that bigotry and accidents of history a century or more ago sorted people by identity, and it is the circumstances into which they sorted that are the problem. Identifying the impetus for the moves may tell us nothing useful about the problems those people face or the attitudes of the majority today.
The second is whether the focus on identity as a source of sorting and power in our time is, itself, a significant cause of bad outcomes. As Yglesias and Sullivan imply, if young gays today are more likely to look for and find discrimination even where it is less present, then that urge probably helps explain “mental health issues.” Similarly, the constant refrain that racial minorities face insurmountable walls of “whiteness” surely contributes to “despair and self-destructive behavior.”
One day, historians will look on the madness of our times and find these observations obvious. Unfortunately, we’ve a couple generations of indoctrinated young adults who need help adjusting to a reality that is better than they’ve been taught to desire. The best thing we can do is to stop the indoctrination of any more millions of children.
Featured image by Gabriel on Unsplash.
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John DePetro has another photo of a group of young people disembarking from a plane at Quonset airport and boarding a bus in the dead of night. He asks good questions:
A flight arrives shortly before 1:AM from Kansas? Who got off the C130 in Quonset? Why are they arriving late at night or early morning? Flight tracker map shows a C130 landing shortly before 1:AM on November 11, 2021.
Odd that no other journalists have picked this up.
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While this view is not shared by all of my compatriots on the right, particularly those inclined to engage in political, social, and cultural battles, I’m a firm believer that in this arena, you cannot fight fire with fire. Consider the aphorism that one should never wrestle with pigs, because one only gets dirty and the pig enjoys it.
One of the deconstructionist Left’s greatest advantages is that conflict is structurally in its favor. Obviously, if one side’s goal is to undermine a peaceful, functional order, degrading the character of the other side’s response to aggression serves that goal. That doesn’t mean the ease of defeating the Left couldn’t be greater than the risk of fighting dirty, but when the Left is culturally dominant, as it is now, fighting fire with fire enters into a trap.
Not to sound all hippyish, but hate cannot defeat hate; it feeds it. Only love can defeat hate. Only reason can defeat ignorance.
Two constructive, positive actions that I’ve seen in the past 24 hours are examples of this better path. First came Ashe Schow’s Daily Wire story on a series of children’s books, “Heroes of Liberty,” newly on the market:
… rather than focus on conservative politics, the aim of the books is to emphasize traditional American values. In a press release provided to The Daily Wire, the publishers of the series describe the books as being “written in an engaging format and filled with breathtaking artwork focusing on the life story and achievements of Americans who are Heroes of Liberty.”
While the initial release will feature Reagan, Sowell, and Coney Barrett, starting in 2022, a new book will be released each month featuring a different “American hero.” Upcoming books will feature John Wayne, Margaret Thatcher, Mark Twain, Douglas MacArthur, Alexander Hamilton, Rush Limbaugh, and others.
More important than the ideas to which we introduce children is the sense we convey to them of who is to be admired. So imagine a parents group collecting money to purchase these books and then petitioning local schools to put them in the libraries. The parents could even host poster contests for class pizza parties or something. Let the progressives who want to cast us as censors because we are suspicious of pornographic literature in school libraries turn around and insist that the schools censor books about unambiguously important Americans.
Next came another Daily Wire article, this one by Luke Rosiak, about a Virginia parish that raised money in addition to official Church assistance as incentive for parishioners to move their children from public school to any Catholic school. Father John De Celles explains, “I think right now the schooling of our children is the issue. We’ll lose them to the culture of death if we don’t.”
The 5% enrollment growth that Catholic schools in Rhode Island experienced this year may owe a lot to their generally better response to COVID-19, but controversies over racial and sexual ideological movements in public schools are likely factors, as well.
Even just including religious instruction as a subject of study sends the message that it’s worth taking seriously and roots a curriculum in a solid ground with which to contrast radicalism. Public schools don’t only purport to teach basic subjects. Long ago, they moved into teaching life skills, and more recently, they’ve been instructing on morality and ethics. To do that while conveying to students that religious belief is something they never have to consider establishes a narrow, anti-religious impulse.
We should embody the alternative to that ideological movement not only in our beliefs, but also in the way those beliefs translate into grace-filled action.
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It shows you the power of the mainstream media to dictate what world people think they live in that even paying as much attention to this stuff as I do, I missed the second of three election-related stories the mainstream media downplayed, according to Ben Johnson:
The legacy media celebrated India Walton, a self-described socialist who defeated the incumbent mayor of Buffalo, New York, in the Democratic primaries. Her ascension seemed to follow the same arc as that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other far-Left Democrats, who successfully muscled other candidates out of the way and pulled their party to the far-Left. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Walton. It appeared that a political star had been born.
But a strange thing happened on the way to Walton’s coronation: The incumbent mayor, traditional Democrat Byron Brown, opted to run as a write-in candidate. On Wednesday, he declared victory.
The bias doesn’t even have to be deliberate (though it may be). It’s natural to look for stories that confirm your sense of the world. When your job is informing others, however, that’s a natural instinct that you ought to overcome.
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Roger Simon asks Republican Congresswoman (and pharmacist) Diana Harshbarger a question pondered often in this space:
So she was a perfect person to ask why she thought the Democrats—aka “The Party of Science,” or so our learned president tells us—ignores natural immunity in favor of taking a militant stand on mandates.
Rep. Harshbarger’s reply: “When it comes to people’s individual rights to control what they put in their body, nobody should say you have to do that. That’s your individual freedom they are trying to take. It’s what’s happening to our country in the loss of our rights over the last nine months, not to mention this month, that we never thought we would ever see.
“They’re trying to dominate us, to take our energy access away. We’re not energy independent anymore. We rely on foreign countries. We’re letting illegals in by the truckload. And now things are going to be rationed.”
And then the congresswoman got to the crux of my question: “I attribute everything to control. The mandate is just part of the process of controlling the narrative of the way our country is going. It’s all about control.”
They just want to know that they can make us do what they want.
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