global warming – monoblogue

Considering the state of emergency

We have reached the point where the perceived inability of Congress to do something – anything – about stemming a tide of illegal immigration across our southern border with Mexico has led President Trump to declare a state of emergency, the preamble of which follows:

The current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency. The southern border is a major entry point for criminals, gang members, and illicit narcotics. The problem of large-scale unlawful migration through the southern border is long-standing, and despite the executive branch’s exercise of existing statutory authorities, the situation has worsened in certain respects in recent years. In particular, recent years have seen sharp increases in the number of family units entering and seeking entry to the United States and an inability to provide detention space for many of these aliens while their removal proceedings are pending. If not detained, such aliens are often released into the country and are often difficult to remove from the United States because they fail to appear for hearings, do not comply with orders of removal, or are otherwise difficult to locate. In response to the directive in my April 4, 2018, memorandum and subsequent requests for support by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense has provided support and resources to the Department of Homeland Security at the southern border. Because of the gravity of the current emergency situation, it is necessary for the Armed Forces to provide additional support to address the crisis.
“Presidential Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States,” February 15, 2019

My reading of the actual directive – which is not long at all, just 629 words – is that, under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (which would have been passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress under President Ford) the President is authorizing the use of military personnel and funds to build a border barrier in the most vulnerable places. I’m going to presume that it’s going to be the style of wall such as this prototype.

A prototype of the border wall preferred by President Trump. (Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)

Naysayers, of course, make the claim that such a wall could be cut through to go with the other claims that a wall can be tunneled under or flown over. Of course, these statements are true but unless the average person has superhuman strength or a MacGyver-like streak of ingenuity with objects carried on one’s person – since I don’t think most would-be border-crossers have a steel-cutting saw, extension cord, and a few spare hours to cut through several inches of steel nor did they bring a backhoe with them to dig a tunnel – I think such a barrier will keep most people out or (as they are really supposed to) funnel them to more easily-guarded ports of entry. It’s part of an “all of the above” border security solution, not the be-all and end-all for the problem.

(To truly solve the issue of illegal immigration, though, we don’t just need border security but also to eliminate the carrots that attract illegal aliens: an end to chain migration and birthright citizenship as well as a crackdown on those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. One would think there is a way to check whether they have duplicate Social Security numbers, forged work visas, or other phony documentation.)

The first question then becomes whether this state of emergency is Constitutional. (Well, if it isn’t first on your mind it really should be.) It took nanoseconds for this to be brought into court, so how should a court decide this?

In such times as this I lean on expert advice, so I looked at what those close to the Constitution Party have to say. This piece from KrisAnne Hall, who bills herself as a “Constitutional Attorney,” says, no, there is not Constitutional justification for the state of emergency. On the other hand, there is Constitutional justification for Trump’s actions in general, argues “Publius Huldah,” a pseudonym for another attorney, Joanna Martin. Thus, the answer would seem to be that a state of emergency wasn’t needed but President Trump couldn’t just capriciously move the money so he chose to use that route instead of citing some of the Constitutional points Publius Huldah did.

From the other side of the spectrum, you get this paranoid article in The Atlantic written by attorney and Brennan Center legal analyst Elizabeth Goitein, who posits that Trump would use these emergency powers to conjure up a reason to disrupt the 2020 election. More of a mainline, comparative view comes in this assessment by William B. Fisch, then a law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law (now professor emeritus, as this was written in the early 1990s.) Fisch argues that the courts have generally deferred to government during times of crisis, snapping back to normal if the subject is questioned and reviewed after the crisis has passed.

In this case, the crisis will likely pass when the first of two differing possibilities occurs: one, the barrier is built to President Trump’s satisfaction, or, secondly, a Democrat becomes President – in that case, the state of emergency regarding the border will be immediately rescinded.

This leads to the second part of the question, which stems from the threat made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that a national emergency could be declared by a Democrat to invoke gun control. (Fellow Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver took this even farther on Twitter, as he considers climate change, income inequality, and access to healthcare as national emergencies, but not border security.)

It’s certain that a Democrat president would try these actions, citing the capricious nature of President Trump’s declaration – a declaration that in this case Democrats didn’t agree was an emergency. (Would it be their intention to encourage illegal immigration, then? You either are for border security or you’re not. Having an easily-breached fence at the border as is the current situation is obviously not doing the trick.)

Yet the effects of illegal aliens in this country are relatively quantifiable to the extent we have statistics on those effects. In terms of crime, though, statistics have suggested that the illegal alien population as a whole is not more likely to be in prison than native-born Americans are: although one piece of research I found is a couple decades old, a more recent Cato Institute study suggests that illegal immigrants are actually less likely to be criminals than native-born – but far more likely to be criminals than legal immigrants.

There’s also the claim that apprehensions are down, but apprehensions are those who were caught, not the total number crossing. Still, there are also costs in education and health care to consider, despite the fact that a large number of the children of illegal aliens are “anchor babies” who have, via a long-standing but improper interpretation of the 14th Amendment, birthright citizenship.

Yet in the other instances Pelosi, et. al., seek to consider as “national emergencies,” there are one or more obstacles in the way – some are legal and others are logical.

With regard to gun control, there isn’t a true national emergency with regard to the tool as there is the attitude that makes those who use it as a weapon to kill (outside of self-defense) believe it’s okay. Having access to a gun does not justify its use to get even with a company that fired you or with someone who defeated you in a game. If there’s any national emergency in that regard, it’s the callous disregard for life our culture seems to have. The gun is not the problem, and leaving a situation where only government has guns will surely lead to abuse of that authority. (Hence the biggest obstacle: the Second Amendment.)

Nor is climate change a national emergency, mainly because there’s little we can do about it. Given the lack of actual accurate observation, we are only speculating what the climate was like until the last couple centuries, but the conventional wisdom holds that our planet has been both warmer and colder as a whole than it exists today. So what is the true optimum climate? We can’t say for sure – for all we know, this so-called climate change could be a return to normal.

Democrats tend to forget there are things bigger than they are.

And then we have “income inequality” and “access to health care.” I just checked, and nowhere in the Constitution are we guaranteed an income or health care. But let’s do a little math in terms of income.

According to the Census Bureau, U.S. median income is $61,372 per household. But over the states, the scale varies widely: Maryland happens to have the highest median income, while Mississippi is the lowest, with a difference of approximately $35,000. To achieve true income equality, a household in Maryland would have to send $35,000 to one in Mississippi. Of course, those in Mississippi would think that’s great but a Maryland family will protest the whole time – what did that family in Mississippi (that probably doesn’t vote the same way as us) do to deserve our $35,000 that we earned?

Now I know that “income inequality” is really a code word among the Left for class envy – a hatred of the so-called 1%. But what would its effects really be?

A rough estimate of CEO-to-employee pay disparity is that CEOs make up to 3,000 times the pay their employees do – that seems to be a favorite complaint on the Left. So let’s say there’s a company with 10,000 employees and one CEO: just to make my math easy we’ll say the employees make $1 and the CEO $3,000. Income equality means that employees share in a pool of $13,000, meaning they all get $1.30. Now a 30% raise sounds great to an employee, but the nearly 100% pay cut means the CEO quits. Then who runs the company?

Actually, this illustration of income inequality is a corollary argument to health care access. Using Maryland and Mississippi as examples again, those in Maryland are fortunate to have a hospital on the scale of Johns Hopkins in their state while some in Mississippi may be 20 miles from a rudimentary clinic. But would those in Maryland be willing to give up their access to help the poor people of Mississippi? Probably not. And just as in the argument about income inequality, given the finite resources the improvement, if done by force, will be minimal.

A capitalist system isn’t perfect for allocating resources, but what it does best is enlarge the available pool. People on the left often deride this as a “trickle-down” theory but in reality it’s a “rising tide” theory that lifts all the boats. Simply compare the situation in Venezuela to our system and you’ll see the result of the foolhardy vision of Democrats.

Maybe our national emergency is that we have lost our common sense?

On modern-day tyranny

By Cathy Keim

In the last few years, I have frequently pondered what it must have felt like to live in the 1930s. As much as people might have tried to ignore what was happening around them, the signs were there that a major upheaval was coming with shifts of power and subsequent grabs for land, resources, and control. As a baby boomer, I grew up with the USA being at its zenith of power. There were uneasy episodes along the way such as the Vietnam War protests, the hippie drug culture, the gas lines in 1973, and the Nixon Watergate scandal, but we were a superpower and no one thought otherwise.

However, the world seems a much less certain place today. As in the 1930s, one can see signs of global shifts of power. Which miscalculation by a diplomat or a politician will be the event that triggers an avalanche from which there is no turning back?

The totalitarian impulses which propelled the world into World War Two are showing up all around us. The difference between authoritarian control and totalitarian control are immense. A banana republic is authoritarian where the generalissimo forces people to do his will, but he does not control their thoughts. A Hitler or a Stalin demands that not only you conform to his will, but that you agree with him also. Obedience is not enough: you must like doing what you are told to do.

The progressive movement in the USA has reached this point of totalitarian control. We must conform to their demands not only outwardly, but we must inwardly accept their premises. Those of us that refuse are reviled as homophobes, bigots, racists, misogynists, haters, Islamophobes, etc. The progressives believe that they are pure of heart. They really do want what is best for us, so it is their duty to force us to do their will. Since they are pure of heart, they cannot do anything that is bad. Even if things turn out poorly, their pure motives mean they never have to say they are sorry.

In addition, you must remember that the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. The run of the mill progressives may really be pure of heart useful idiots, but the powerbrokers understand that everything is about power.

It is only when you put the events of the day in this rubric that you are able to make sense of the insane situations that you regularly confront in daily news. Occasionally you may have to pinch yourself to remember that you still live in America.

The Washington Times states: The Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution this week that bans textbooks and other teaching materials that deny climate change exists or cast doubt on whether humans are to blame.

If a mom or dad questions a book that they feel is inappropriate for their child to read in a school library, they are ridiculed for wanting to ban books, but here we have a school board denying skeptics the right to question anthropogenic global warming. So much for encouraging critical thinking.

Of course, the precedent was already set when a group of 16 state Attorney Generals announced on March 29, 2016, “an unprecedented campaign to pursue companies that challenge the catastrophic climate change narrative, raising concerns over free speech and the use of state authority to punish political foes.”

Now if we deny climate change, we can be punished for not thinking correctly. Orwell wrote about thoughtcrime in a work of fiction, but this is getting scarily close to a totalitarian state and climate change is by no means the only issue which demands the correct viewpoint.

Child abuse is considered to be a bad thing, but now it is hard to know what is considered child abuse. If I expect a male child to use the boys’ bathroom and a female child to use the girls’ bathroom, then this qualifies as child abuse if the child in question thinks that he is a girl. If I try to help this child to understand his gender, then I am a horrible person. However, if I teach little children that their gender is fluid and that they can choose whether they are a girl or a boy, then I am a progressive, pure-of-heart caring person and all is well. The chaos and destruction that will come from this pure-of-heart nonsense is not their problem. The pure-of-heart are never called to account when things go awry.

The key factor in all of this is the turning of the world upside down and ridiculing those that resist. I realize more and more that every issue I address has me sounding like a hateful, bitter clinger to the old ways. This was pressed home to me vividly when I collected signatures to defeat gay marriage in Maryland. I was moved by Christian values that place the family at the center of society. As I talked to people, I watched the tide turn against marriage between one man and one woman because the progressives used the gambit that every person has the right to marry the one that they love. Why would I deny a man the right to marry the man that he loved?

Those of us that stand for the ultimate child protection that is a stable family with a mother and a father raising their children were washed away by the lie that “love” is more important. This is the same kind of upside down thinking that progressives promote when they say that it is better to abort a child than to have them enter the world unwanted. How is murder better? Who is to say that nobody wants the child, even if the mother does not?

When the world reaches the current state of affairs where there is no right to dissent from the progressive’s agenda, then it is time for people of courage and conviction to dig in and refuse to bow the knee to their self-proclaimed masters. The cognitive dissonance that surrounds us will overwhelm us and our children unless we clearly and bravely state the truth to ourselves, our families, and our communities.

Hope dies when the truth dies. People cannot live without hope. All tyrants everywhere seek to squelch the truth because then they can truly control those around them. As a free people it is our duty to speak out against the insanity that the progressives are pushing upon us. State the truth clearly and often. To do less is to acquiesce to tyranny.

The ‘clean energy scam’ in Maryland

The inspiration for this post was received yesterday when I perused a commentary by Townhall.com writers Amy Oliver Cooke and Michael Sandoval called “Disasters Keep Hitting Clean Energy Scam.” It picks out over two dozen news items which illustrate the folly of so-called clean energy, alternatives which have “so far failed to demonstrate the necessary economic and energy-efficient capacity to succeed in a true energy market,” the authors write.

Their work got me to thinking about events closer to home. While Maryland doesn’t have its own Solyndra on a federal level and our efforts against Radical Green have been more concentrated lately on the battle to thwart the adoption of PlanMaryland, we indeed have our issues and spend many tax dollars on alternative energy. Governor O’Malley is foursquare a believer in anthropogenic climate change and has connived the Maryland General Assembly into passing several measures ceding a significant market share to these alternatives without a clear market demand for them.

For example, we’ve passed and since tightened twice a solar energy portfolio utilities are mandated to meet or pay a penalty, entered the extortion of local utilities otherwise known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – a nifty model of wealth redistribution – and mandated a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases (read: our standard of living), just to name a few. Aside from the original solar energy portfolio mandates, these bills were all introduced at O’Malley’s behest and rushed through without much thought about the impact on the state’s economy. On the other hand, even exploring for offshore oil is something O’Malley “can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to go forward with” and tapping into a proven source of energy such as the Marcellus Shale formation has to be studied to death before Marylanders can take advantage. Meanwhile, our state is a net importer of electricity because of its high density, small land mass, and unwillingness to build the generating plants to bring balance (a Calvert Cliffs would likely not be built today.)

I have little doubt that there may come a time when some of these alternatives could work well, but the problem is we can’t depend on the fickle nature of natural phenomena to promote a 24/7/365 economy. To do so would place us in the same category as Third World nations which are lucky to have electricity a few hours a day, if at all. A stretch of cloudy, rainy days isn’t going to make a solar panel very useful nor will those hot, still days of midsummer do much to turn a wind turbine. Even a more reliable natural source like hydroelectric production could be curtailed by a lengthy dry spell.

It’s quite telling to me that radical environmentalists reflexively believe that any alternative energy or restriction of fossil fuel usage is great, and those skeptics like me need some sort of reeducation. (After all, why else would Maryland mandate environmental education in the schools? Can’t let those who know the real score influence those “skulls full of mush” in a politically incorrect way.) I’ll concede that someday in the distant future we will indeed eventually run out of marketable fossil fuels, but I have faith that someone in the private sector will also figure out a way forward – sort of like how Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wright brothers did.

The problem I have is in the force of law telling us we must adapt or the government tilting the playing field in a specific direction toward these unproven technologies. If someone wants to place a bed of solar panels or put up a windmill to power their farm (as was done a century ago) I say go ahead and do so – just pay for it out of your own pocket. If there’s economic viability in doing so, then by all means take advantage. But that economic viability shouldn’t include a cut from the state funding siphoned from your neighbors while other legitimate functions of government go wanting.

Friday night videos episode 25

Bringing back the FNV franchise again after a week off, so let’s see what the extra week has given me to work with.

Lots of video on the health care debacle, as you might expect. Pollster Scott Rasmussen talks to the Washington News-Observer on the upcoming midterm elections and about how unpopular Obamacare really is:

It wasn’t too popular among this group either. My blogger friend Bob McCarty (who lives in that area) covered the counter-protest to President Obama’s health care show in St. Charles, Missouri.

If I didn’t put this on when it first came out, I sure missed out. This edition of FNV will be graced by the common sense of Rep. Mike Pence, perhaps my favorite member of Congress.

But the Democrats do reveal the facts about their health care bill.

Speaking of leading Democrats, in a couple weeks we’re going to see the third edition of the TEA Party Express, which begins in Searchlight, Nevada (Harry Reid’s hometown.) Mark Williams of TPX3 wanted to have a conversation with MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan but you can see how the left expresses “Anger in America.”

And if you’re interested in saddling up and heading out west, they have an interesting lineup to start their tour – wonder how many will be there for the other stops?

Let’s finish the political end of FNV with something humorous. We can laugh about this now that this half of the globe is actually warming (with a corresponding cooling on the other side – funny how that works, huh?)

Now the fun part. This comes from one of my favorite regional bands and was recorded live at the Trocadero Theater in Philadelphia (unfortunately, not by me.) Hailing from Smyrna, Delaware, this is 13:1.

If you go to their website, crank out ‘No Goodbyes.’ (Feel free to do so with their other songs if you wish, too.)

With that, we put another FNV in the books. That was fun.