If All You See…

By William Teach March 22, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…is an area flooded from too much carbon pollution Bad Weather, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Weasel Zippers, with a post on the Treasury Secretary saying the economy is doing well.

Read: If All You See… »

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Inflation Is Transitory: Fed Looks To Raise Rates To Highest Since 2006

By William Teach March 22, 2023 – 10:30 am

Remember when we were told 2 years ago that inflation was temporary? That it wouldn’t last? That the economy was just fine? Sure, we all understand that the politicians do not want to be really negative, but, the way everything was positioned was that it was all in your mind. Yet

Federal Reserve ‘between a rock and a hard place’ as interest rate decision looms

Federal Reserve officials will convene this week for one of the central bank’s most uncertain policy meetings in years.

Forced to balance the consequences of a banking crisis and inflation that remains well above target, the Fed is expected to raise interest rates by another 0.25% when it releases its latest policy decision at 2:00 p.m. ET Wednesday afternoon. This move would bring the Fed’s benchmark interest rate range to 4.75%-5%, the highest since 2006. Fed Chair Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET to explain the Fed’s decision.

“They’re in between a rock and a hard place,” said Wilmer Stith, bond portfolio manager for Wilmington Trust. “There’s a banking crisis and it’s really a very tenuous, uncomfortable position for the Fed to be in.”

During his semi-annual testimony before Congress in early March, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said strong economic data would likely push interest “higher than previously anticipated.” (snip)

Still, as of Tuesday morning, data from the CME Group showed investors placing an 85% chance on the Fed raising rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday.

“If they stop and reverse [rate hikes], that could cause markets to believe they’re not fighting inflation when inflation is still a problem, giving you higher mortgage rates and funding costs for corporations and just a tighter vice on the economy,” Stith said.

The problem here is that it is significantly reducing loans. Auto loans are way down, as people refuse to pay for the too-high used car prices (even if they have come down) at those higher interest rates. It’s so bad that a lot of dealers refuse to quote rates based on credit: you’ll just be told “let’s submit to the banks, let them tell us.” It’s cooling off small business loans and home loans. Home equity loans and personal loans.

In December, the Fed’s SEP suggested rates would peak in a range of 5%-5.25% during this rate hiking cycle. Powell’s testimony earlier this month suggested this outlook is what would need altering from the central bank.

Yeah, but what you end up with is loans that are much higher. When someone with an 810 credit score is seeing 5.99 as the best rate, when they would have had 3.99 two years ago, they hold off. As for the banks, if they are so mismanaged, let them fail. Where are all the regulators? Oh, right, they’re concerned with DEI and ‘climate change’. Regardless, raising the rates has not helped the economy, food, consumer goods, etc, are still way higher, and most are not coming down.

Read: Inflation Is Transitory: Fed Looks To Raise Rates To Highest Since 2006 »

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Federal Judge Rules Against Brandon’s Waters Of The USA Rule

By William Teach March 22, 2023 – 7:00 am

Just like when the Obama admin tried this, it was vast over-reach by los Federales and an attempt to control vast swaths of privately owned property, including people’s yards, hence, their homes. It’s really not surprising that a judge ruled against it

Federal judge delivers blow to Biden’s climate agenda: ‘Destructive federal overreach’

A federal judge blocked the Biden administration from implementing environmental regulations redefining how water sources are protected, but which opponents have argued were an example of overreach.

In his decision published late Sunday, Judge Jeffrey Brown ruled that the so-called Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule announced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in late December “poses irreparable harm” to residents of Texas and Idaho, the two states that challenged the regulations in the lawsuit filed on Jan. 18. Brown declined to issue a nationwide injunction, but noted 25 other states have challenged the rule in two separate ongoing lawsuits.

While I continue to battle the rule in court, this preliminary injunction is a major blow to the Biden Administration’s radical environmental agenda,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Monday. “The unlawful rule would have saddled Texans across the state with crushing new regulations, slowing our state’s economic development and limiting our job growth. (snip)

The rule ultimately opens the door for the federal government to regulate wetlands, lakes, ponds, streams and “relatively permanent” waterways, largely mimicking a pre-2015 environmental rule set during the Obama administration which implemented the changes in an effort to curb water pollution. The regulation is a broad interpretation of which water sources require protection under the Clean Water Act.

That little stream that runs through your backyard would be under the control of the federal government. A stream that appears when it rains? It would be under federal control. It’s beyond egregious, but, not unexpected from Progressives (nice Fascists): they want control of everything at the federal level.

Will the Brandon admin appeal? We shall see.

Read: Federal Judge Rules Against Brandon’s Waters Of The USA Rule »

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Scientists Call COVID Raccoon Dog Study “Pure Trash”

By William Teach March 22, 2023 – 6:45 am

OK, they didn’t actually call it that, they used more measured, scientific terms

Scientists discredit raccoon dog Covid origin study

A study suggesting that raccoon dogs may have started the Covid pandemic is “risibly thin” and compiled by authors who have previously claimed to have “incontrovertible” proof of a market origin, scientists have warned.

Miriam Webster defines “risible” as “arousing or provoking laughter. Associated with, relating to, or used in laughter.” So, the study is so thin it causes laughter. So, pure trash

Yet after the study was published last night, several experts said the claims were misleading, arguing that the sale of raccoon dogs at the market was already widely known, and that discovering their DNA proved little about the origins of the outbreak.

A letter from Biosafety Now, a group of experts calling for tighter control on lab experiments which could create deadly pathogens, said: “The data provide no substantive new information about the origins of Covid-19, even if taken at face value.

“There is no evidence that this raccoon dog was even infected with SARS-CoV-2, as there was also human DNA in the sample, and the viral material could just as easily have come from an infected human.”

A statement from the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, the World Health Organisation group looking into how the pandemic started, also stated that the paper “does not provide conclusive evidence as to the intermediate host or origins of the virus”.

The study was leaked, and not even published till Monday, and, scientists already knew it was trash in relation to showing any link that Wuhan Flu came from raccoon dogs. It seems like a ready excuse 3 years on, when they had been blaming it on bats and pangolins, anything but that laboratory which was investigating coronaviruses and has a shoddy record with lab leaks and was right down the road.

Read: Scientists Call COVID Raccoon Dog Study “Pure Trash” »

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Bummer: Insect Farming To Help Climate (scam) Might Have An Ethical Blindspot

By William Teach March 21, 2023 – 3:00 pm

Via Moonbattery, which notes

Our globalist overlords bark that we must eat bugs to stop the climate from fluctuating. However, it has been discovered that eating insects oppresses them.

Leftists need to destroy agriculture in the name of the global warming hoax before imposing a ban on eating bugs. For now, only moonbats would eat them anyway.

And away we go!

Insect Farming Is Booming. But Is It Cruel?
More than a trillion insects are raised each year as high-protein, low-carbon animal feed, but the practice might have an ethical blind spot.

….

But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.

It’s a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?

We obviously need a new world war (Biden’s trying), alien invasion, or zombie apocalypse so people have real issues to be concerned over

“We’re at the starting point of a conversation about insect welfare,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics. One of the key questions here is whether insects are sentient and have the capacity to feel pain and suffer. Pigs, chickens, and fish are already widely recognized as sentient. In 2021, Birch wrote a report that led to the UK government recognizing sentience in squid and octopuses, as well as crabs, lobsters, and all vertebrate animals. Research on insect sentience is much more patchy. There are more than a million known insect species and only a handful have ever been studied to see whether they can feel pain.

Who’s this “we”, chump? Anyhow, these people are just wonkers, and someone was paid to write 18 paragraphs.

Read: Bummer: Insect Farming To Help Climate (scam) Might Have An Ethical Blindspot »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 5 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach March 21, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…are world killing dogs causing trees to die, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Victory Girls Blog, with a post on DC residents saying “nope” to Fauci.

Read: If All You See… »

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Biden Signs COVID Declassification Bill, Will Withhold Some Information

By William Teach March 21, 2023 – 10:30 am

Who wants to bet that the documents he withholds will be the pertinent ones?

Biden signs COVID declassification bill, hints at withholding some information

President Biden on Monday signed a bill directing the federal government to declassify intelligence about the origins of COVID-19.

The bipartisan legislation allows the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify intelligence related to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The cites potential inks to research at the facility and the outbreak.

“My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID–19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this legislation, my Administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”

What information about a disease could harm national security? Perhaps how it was gathered and by who, but, that you could certainly leave out. Starting out with the notion of withholding information shows that Biden has little intent to actually be honest with the Congress and the American People on what the federal agencies know.

“It’s been three years since COVID-19 upended our lives, and we’re still asking basic questions about the origins of this virus. That’s unacceptable,” Chairman Mike Gallagher of the newly-formed House Select Committee on China, previously told Fox News Digital.

“The question of how this pandemic began is the most important question in the world, and we should not continue to waste precious time waiting for the Chinese Communist Party to suddenly cooperate with U.S. officials and open up access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he added. “It’s time for Congress to act and force the administration to declassify the relevant intelligence surrounding the pandemic.”

It is unacceptable, and you can bet that documents linking Fauci and the NIH will be hidden, along with other information that makes government look bad and authoritarian.

Meanwhile, the mask cult is still alive and kicking

Guest: Oklahoma could have avoided 70% of COVID deaths with a temporary mask mandate

Three years of COVID-19. Nearly 7 million worldwide deaths. About 18,000 deaths here in Oklahoma. Thank God, it is waning. What have we learned about the science, about humanity, about the government’s role, and about how we (or future generations) prepare for the next pandemic? (snip)

Looking back at June 2020, after we started reopening, if we would have had a temporary statewide mask mandate (until the vaccine became widely available), we could have avoided 70% (the effectiveness of reasonable masks) of the deaths over those nine months or so. We could have avoided 5,000 deaths.

I’d like to see that study, which is not cited in the article by Dr. Ervin Yen, who is an Oklahoma City resident who was an Independent candidate for governor of Oklahoma in 2022. If masks are so great, why did more people die from COVID when masks were required all over the U.S. and vaccines were available? Why did Sweden, which had no mask mandate, have such a low mortality rate? Nor did Sweden have all those restrictive mandates, which Dr. Yen mentions as loving and totally supports.

Read: Biden Signs COVID Declassification Bill, Will Withhold Some Information »

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Surprise: New Yorkers Will See Sticker Shock On Their Utility Bills

By William Teach March 21, 2023 – 7:15 am

This is what happens when you replace affordable, dependable, reliable, easily obtainable energy with expensive, unreliable energy at the whim of Government. I mean, great, the green energy is more expensive but less reliable!

Sticker shock awaits New Yorkers’ utility bills to fund renewables

New York is eager to move away from fossil fuels. Customers, though, will feel the switch in their wallets.

The state has largely funded the recent investments in clean energy, electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and new transmission lines incrementally through piecemeal decisions by the quasi-independent Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.

But larger bills for the aggressive transition are increasingly coming due, and it has the potential for sticker shock for ratepayers — a byproduct of the tremendous complexity of shifting from from fossil fuels to heat and power homes and businesses.

Some of the costs are already impacting utility bills, but more are set to hit in the coming years as projects come online.

“Financing them exclusively through rates, particularly on residential, is the least progressive mechanism for financing anything. We make no judgment whether you have the money to pay or you don’t have the money to pay,” John Howard, a commissioner on the Public Service Commission, said at last month’s meeting.

In other words, if your bills skyrocket and you cannot afford them, well, the Progressive NY government is saying f*** you. Deal. Suck it up. Freeze. I wonder if they have considered that citizens will start using more wood from cutting down trees, bringing in propane and natural gas from outside the state, or, simply packing up and leaving, bringing their tax dollars and businesses with them?

It will lead to blackouts and brown-outs. An inability to provide power during inclement weather, like snow and rain. And the extra cost for the energy for businesses will be passed on to the consumer, so, consumer goods, appliances, services, food, clothes, you name it will just go up up up. Great move!

One day the world will be in a spot where we can do away with polluting energy sources, but, it is not now.

And not one reporter will ask NY Governor Kathy Hochul if she herself has given up her own use of fossil fuels.

Read: Surprise: New Yorkers Will See Sticker Shock On Their Utility Bills »

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So, Will The Politicized Prosecution Of Trump Happen Today?

By William Teach March 21, 2023 – 7:00 am

Democrats have been playing a very dangerous game in their attempt to Get Trump, one that could easily boomerang back on Democrat

Trump probe: law enforcement don’t expect arraignment until next week, virtual option off the table

Law enforcement officials met behind closed doors Monday to discuss the logistics of arraigning former President Trump following his possible indictment over hush-money payments made on his behalf during the 2016 presidential campaign.

A law enforcement source told Fox News Monday that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and different branches of law enforcement discussed the logistics of closing down streets and putting lights up with generators, extra barriers, and extra police.

The source said law enforcement does not expect the former president to be arraigned until next week as the Manhattan grand jury – which has been meeting secretly to hear evidence for weeks – has another witness on Wednesday. A virtual option was apparently ruled out as the District Attorney is opposed to it.

The source told Fox News that law enforcement is concerned about safety. If the former president does come up to Manhattan, there will be a major police presence and the area will get shut down. Trump has called on his supporters to protest ahead of a possible indictment.

Beyond whether this happens, will they overreach by going and arresting him, or, allow him to turn himself in? I really wouldn’t bet against the unhinged Trump Deranged to go perp-walk Trump.

The grand jury has been probing Trump’s involvement in a $130,000 payment made in 2016 to the porn actor Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public about a sexual encounter she said she had with him years earlier. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, through a shell company before being reimbursed by Trump, whose company, the Trump Organization, logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorneys office for the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019, even as Cohen implicated him as part of his deal. The Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.

This is the best they got? No one considered charging Bill Clinton over his hush money to Paula Jones. There’s also a big case issue on whether the statue of limitations has passed.

(MSDNC) The first problem, though not at all insurmountable, is that this is an old case. The actions giving rise to this case took place years ago. In fact, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, has already been sentenced to federal prison and served time for his part in this alleged conspiracy. Right before the 2016 presidential election, Cohen, through a shell company, paid Daniels $130,000 not to share her claims that she had had an affair with Trump. A hush money payment in and of itself isn’t illegal. The problem here was that it was done to influence the 2016 presidential election and should therefore be viewed as an undisclosed campaign contribution that was way over the applicable limit of $2,700 per donor per election.

Proving intent to defraud, if this is kicked up to a felony, will be a seriously difficult task, much harder than getting a far left grand jury to indict, especially when the feds have refused to indict. Back to the beginning of that piece

If the rule of law and the idea that no person is above the law mean anything, we must hold the man who tried to destroy our government from the inside to account; former President Donald Trump must face criminal indictment. But if New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicts Trump on charges related to his hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, it could threaten every other investigation against him. That’s why, for some of Trump’s biggest critics, the prospect of an indictment related to the Daniels case leads to little but existential dread. That’s not because the facts show Trump engaged in no wrongdoing; quite the opposite. It is because of all the legal cases Trump faces, this one may be the hardest to prove.

If Trump successfully defends himself against an indictment for his role in the payment to Daniels, we can predict he will use it as vindication that any and all charges brought against him are merely so-called witch hunts. It doesn’t take much to imagine Trump’s ceaseless gloating about a loss by the New York prosecutors. And this could have a cascade effect, not only emboldening Trump’s false claims that he has done nothing wrong, but also making other prosecutors skittish about charging Trump in other cases.

It’s just going to look beyond partisan politics

(Breitbart) Andrew McCarthy, former chief assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has never been a fan of Trump’s, over the weekend blasted Bragg’s case against the former president as “nonsense” and a “blatantly partisan exercise of raw power.”

“This is a classic, invidious selective prosecution. It is being launched strictly for political purposes,” he wrote in a column for the National Review Online.

“It is hard to think of anything that will more rile up Trump’s base and anger other Republicans who, regardless of their distaste for Trump, will find this maneuver despicable,” he argued.

This is not going to go well.

Read: So, Will The Politicized Prosecution Of Trump Happen Today? »

Posted in Donald Trump, Unhinged Tools | 10 Comments | Trackback URL

United Nations Says We Only Have Till The Early 2030’s To Stop Hotcoldwetdry Doom

By William Teach March 20, 2023 – 3:00 pm

We had 12 years per the UN in 2018. But, then it was 18 months in July of 2019. And now

From the link (which you can avoid the paywall by saving it to Pocket)

Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level, according to a major new report released on Monday.

The report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, offers the most comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet is changing. It says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.

So, we went from 2030 to mid-2030s. When does it move to late 2030’s, then 2040s?

That number holds a special significance in global climate politics: Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, virtually every nation agreed to “pursue efforts” to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond that point, scientists say, the impacts of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction become significantly harder for humanity to handle.

“Global climate politics”. Because this is not about science.

Read: United Nations Says We Only Have Till The Early 2030’s To Stop Hotcoldwetdry Doom »

Posted in AGW Socialism, Global Warming | 4 Comments | Trackback URL
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