Surprise: The US Foreign Policy Under Biden Is A Steaming Hot Mess

By William Teach April 13, 2023 – 6:45 am

The NY Times has run an interesting piece on just how bad foreign policy is, but, stops short of actually blaming Biden. Peter Baker almost made it, but, either pulled back or the editors forced him to pull back. Now, just imagine how it would go if Trump was president (Times piece here, I’m using a reprint which is not behind the paywall)

Biden faces an era when treaties are more likely to be broken than brokered

Biden Brain SuckerPresident Biden leaves today for Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence. But the commemoration also serves as an unspoken reminder that such diplomatic breakthroughs have become a thing of the past.

At a time of ferocious warfare in Europe and crackling tension elsewhere around the globe, the sort of bold, painstaking negotiation that brought peace to the Emerald Isle a quarter-century ago has largely disappeared from the scene. Bargaining tables sit empty these days. Shuttle diplomacy planes have been grounded. Treaties are more likely to be broken than brokered.

It would be too much to call it the death of diplomacy, but there certainly is a dearth of diplomacy for now. While Biden fervently believes in deal making, his efforts to revive the Iran nuclear accord have collapsed, and it is widely considered futile to even try to end the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict or negotiate with North Korea at this point. The Russians have suspended the New START treaty, the last major Russian-American arms control agreement, and there appears to be little prospect for diplomacy to halt the fighting in Ukraine in the near term.

As Michael Goodwin writes about the article

The real questions are ones that Baker never touches: Why is this happening on Biden’s watch? And don’t great leaders write history instead of being victims of it?

After all, Baker concedes that Donald Trump secured the historic Abraham Accords in the Mideast and a new and improved NAFTA trade deal, while failing to get a new trade deal with China.

That’s far more than Biden has done or even tried.

For all the caterwauling about Trump, he at least attempted diplomacy, be it with North Korea’s wackjob leader (yeah, I did think the way he went about it was dumb, but, hey, nothing else worked, right?) or Russia. Remember, no new wars under Trump. He worked to end them.

The answer is something else Baker can’t or won’t say: Biden is the weakest president America has had since Jimmy Carter and the world knows it.

That single fact explains why China, Russia and Iran are making common cause like never before.

They refuse to make deals with the US because they don’t see any reason to make concessions to what they view as a declining power.

If you keep up with the news, you see all the countries that are getting into bed with Russia and China, who are ignoring the U.S. (such as Saudi Arabia). Nations are starting to blow off the US dollar, and allowing the use of other currency, such as from India. French president Macron is blowing of Joe to deal with China.

Mostly what Joe has done is show his weakness, particularly with his Afghanistan debacle, leading to Russia invading Ukraine, and, rather than peace, it’s a slow grind towards WWIII.

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EPA’s New MPG Rules Will Push People In EVs They Cannot Afford

By William Teach April 12, 2023 – 3:00 pm

The new EPA rule has the climate cultists really, really excited. I wonder how many of the low and middle class ones realize the rule will make new vehicles unaffordable?

E.P.A. Lays Out Rules to Turbocharge Sales of Electric Cars and Trucks

The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.

The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his “horseless carriage” for a test run and changed American life and industry.

The government’s challenge to automakers is monumental; Last year, all-electric vehicles were just 5.8 percent of new cars sold in the United States. All-electric trucks were even more rare, making up fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold.

And the vast majority of those vehicles are being purchased by people making over $150K a year. This will leave the working and middle class out of being able to afford a new vehicle. It will end the notion of family vehicles, like minivans and midsized SUVs. Take a look at the vehicles sold in Europe: they’re mostly small.

Nearly all major automakers have already invested billions in producing electric vehicles at the same time as they continue to manufacture the conventional vehicles powered by gasoline, which deliver their profits. The proposed regulations would require them to invest more heavily and reorient their processes in ways that would essentially spell the end of the internal combustion engine.

That would be the textbook definition for the economic portion of socialism, where the government is heavily involved in running the economy, up to and including owning the means of production. But, it moves more into the authoritarian model, where the government is forcing citizens to act in a certain manner.

If the two rules are enacted as proposed, they would put the world’s largest economy on track to slash its planet-warming emissions at the pace that scientists say is required of all nations in order to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change.

And it would severely restrict the ability of US citizens to travel. Unless they want to take the bus or train.

The proposed tailpipe pollution limits for cars, first reported by The New York Times on Saturday, are designed to ensure that 67 percent of sales of new light-duty passenger vehicles, from sedans to pickup trucks, will be all-electric by 2032. Additionally, 46 percent of sales of new medium-duty trucks, such as delivery vans, will be all-electric or of some other form of zero-emissions technology by the same year, according to the plan.

So, when do the top end climate cultists practice what they’re forcing everyone else to practice? When does Biden go EV? How about Kamala? How about Michael S. Reagan, the EPA administrator? I wonder how many EPA employees are driving EVs? How many of them will answer “well, that’s just inconvenient, because we have the kids, have to get them around?”

Now, just image the massive fossil fueled convoy taking Biden around

Those do not look like EVs.

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 12, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…is wonderful bamboo, which is a great alternative biomass source of energy from fossil fuels, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Jo Nova, with a post on the plague of mental illness in teen girls

Read: If All You See… »

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Surprise: China Is Struggling With Lab Safety

By William Teach April 12, 2023 – 10:30 am

The Washington Post isn’t quite ready to lean toward the notion of COVID19 having leaked from the Wuhan lab yet, though

China’s struggles with lab safety carry danger of another pandemic

In the summer of 2019, a mysterious accident occurred inside a government-run biomedical complex in north-central China, a facility that handles a pathogen notorious for its ability to pass easily from animals to humans.

There were no alarms or flashing lights to alert workers to the defect in a sanitation system that was supposed to kill germs in the vaccine plant’s waste. When the system failed in late July that year, millions of airborne microbes began seeping invisibly from exhaust vents and drifting into nearby neighborhoods. Nearly a month passed before the problem was discovered and fixed, and four months before the public was informed. By then, at least 10,000 people had been exposed, with hundreds developing symptomatic illnesses, scientific studies later concluded.

The events occurred not in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began, but in another Chinese city, Lanzhou, 800 miles to the southeast. The leaking pathogens were bacterial spores that cause brucellosis, a common livestock disease that can lead to chronic illness or even death in humans if not treated. As the pandemic enters its fourth year, new details about the little-known Lanzhou incident offer a revealing glimpse into a much larger — and largely hidden — struggle with biosafety across China in late 2019, at the precise moment when both the brucellosis incident and the coronavirus outbreak were coming to light.

Multiple probes into both events by U.S. and international scientists and lawmakers are spotlighting what experts describe as China’s vulnerability to serious lab accidents, exposing problems that allowed deadly pathogens to escape in the past and could well do so again, potentially triggering another pandemic.

China has had many leaks leading to smaller pandemics, such as SARS and swine flu. Wuhan was working with coronaviruses in bats just up the road from the wet market. Their security has been known to be lax, and you know they are working on these for biowarfare.

Beijing has embarked on a major expansion of the country’s biotechnology sector, pouring billions of dollars into constructing dozens of laboratories and encouraging cutting-edge — and sometimes controversial — research in fields including genetic engineering, and experimental vaccines and therapeutics. The expansion is part of a government-mandated effort to rival or surpass the scientific capabilities of the United States and other Western powers. Yet, safety practices in China’s new labs have failed to keep pace, a Washington Post examination has found.

But

Whether lab safety was a factor in the coronavirus outbreak remains unclear. The World Health Organization and the U.S. intelligence community both continue to point to a possible lab accident as one of the two ways that the pandemic may have started. In an updated intelligence assessment revealed publicly in February, Energy Department analysts joined the FBI in concluding that a lab leak was the most likely cause, although some other U.S. agencies continued to side with scientists who think a natural spillover from infected animals — perhaps raccoon dogs, sold at a Wuhan market — is to blame. Advocates of both theories expressed only low or moderate confidence in their conclusions.

Despite all the Washington Post research, they aren’t quite willing to truly think that a lab leak is the most likely source for Wuhan flu. Despite a long, long piece on lab safety issues in China, you know they don’t want to embrace the most likely scenario, because Trump pushed it, and so do Republicans.

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Chicago Is Invested In Dealing With Climate Apocalypse

By William Teach April 12, 2023 – 7:15 am

Priorities!

Fighting climate change in the Windy City

From the start of his quest to become mayor of Chicago, progressive Brandon Johnson made environmental justice a personal issue.

The former Chicago public school teacher talked about his own battles with asthma — “I grew up with asthma. I still suffer from it.” — a condition known to be exacerbated by pollution. And everywhere Johnson went, he talked about how he was raising three children in Chicago’s Far West Side neighborhood of Austin, a majority-Black area that is ranked as one of the most polluted areas in the Windy City.

“For too long our communities have been seen as dumping grounds for waste and materials that no one seems to know what else to do with,” Johnson said at a mayoral forum held in the heavily Latino neighborhood of Pilsen.

Those sound like environmental issues, nothing to do with Hotcoldwetdry.

Johnson’s first test would be how much he could deliver on the building emissions ordinance that Chicago’s green groups have long waited for. The mayor-elect promised “a climate justice buildings ordinance” — which would tackle emissions but keep tenants’ energy bills low — as a top priority of his administration.

If passed, the ordinance would compel buildings and historic skyscrapers in the nation’s third-largest city to choose between reducing emissions — or paying a huge fine. The idea is to create “pollution-free” homes and buildings in the city, where such structures are responsible for 69 percent of the city’s total emissions. (Buildings account for a majority of emissions for most big cities — 70 percent in New York City and 80 percent in St. Louis.)

I wonder how well that will work out

(WGN) Walmart plans to close four stores in Chicago by mid-April, the company announced Tuesday.

Officials with the department store cited profit margins as the reasoning behind the closing.

“The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years. The remaining four Chicago stores continue to face the same business difficulties, but we think this decision gives us the best chance to help keep them open and serving the community,” a press release stated.

All four stores are in high crime areas of the city. The violent crime rate is over double the Illinois and national rates.

(Illinois Policy) Theft is driving the overall increase in crime. Car theft is up 114% since 2018, and other thefts increased by 32% since 2018. Just last year, motor vehicle theft increased by 102% and theft by 56%.

In 2021, Chicago saw more than 45,000 people stop calling the city their home. Only two other big cities had more residents move away compared to Chicago. New York and San Francisco both experienced greater populations losses than Chicago, with New York losing over 305,000 people.

What happens when the mayors silly focus on ‘climate change’ drives out tax paying citizens and businesses, especially as the city continues to avoid dealing with the crime?

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SNL’s Michael Che Solves Gun Crimes Or Something

By William Teach April 12, 2023 – 7:00 am

The Daily Beast thought this was a totally awesome idea from Che. This is the type of serious thought you’d expect from the gun grabbers

Michael Che Just Solved Gun Violence With One Instagram Post

Comedian Michael Che has a history of deleting his social media posts. But he might want to keep his latest one up.

On Tuesday, the co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” posted a message on Instagram that read, “ya kno… a lot of people are not drinking bud light, cause the company used a trans person in their ad.. and these mostly right wing bud light customers have tossed all their bud lights in the trash in a blind rage.. and it got me ta’thinkin.. just hear me out..”

On the next slide, Che concluded the thought with, “what if we got trans people.. hear me out.. to do ads for guns..?” (snip)

Che’s post, meanwhile, received enthusiastic praise from celebrities like comedian Patton Oswalt and The Roots bandleader Questlove, as well as trans pop star Kim Petras.

“Did you just end gun crimes?” one follower wrote in response. “I think so.”

Hmm, did Michael consider that the building they film SNL in has armed security? Does he really think that firearms makers will have some mentally deranged trans nutter do their ads? And, would this make any difference, since the criminals couldn’t give a damn, but, they’d really love if Americans disarmed themselves?

Meanwhile

(Breitbart) Kentucky House Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D) pushed for more background checks Tuesday, the day after a portfolio banker shot and killed five people with a gun he acquired via a background check at a local gun store in Louisville, Kentucky.

Breitbart News reported that Metropolitan Louisville Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel said the portfolio banker got his gun “legally” from a Louisville dealer on April 4, 2023. Passing a background check is a federal requirement for getting a gun from a dealer.

Another Breitbart piece notes that 29 different mass killings made after people passed a federal backgrounds check. So, expanding them would do nothing. Perhaps if the laws were followed and people with issues were reported via the system so that they would fail a background check? Of course, right after the gun grabbers say they aren’t trying to gun grab they’ll say the U.S. needs to ban all private ownership of guns.

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Climate Doom Is A Bigger Emergency Than Wuhan Flu Or Something

By William Teach April 11, 2023 – 3:00 pm

The climate cultists certainly wouldn’t use what they believe is a climate emergency to implement all those same controls and more as during the COVID emergency, right? Lockdowns, movement restrictions, closing certain businesses, closing churches, forcing people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do, etc

Climate emergency is the biggest health crisis of our time – bigger than Covid

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is a grim, yet unsurprising, reminder of the catastrophic effect global heating is having on our planet. The message from leading climate scientists is clear: action is needed now. Not tomorrow, not next year, not by the end of the decade.

If memory serves, the IPCC says this every year. And then they have tens of thousands take fossil fueled travel, and many take private jets, to the IPCC conference in November each year.

Even drastic carbon reduction today that limits temperature increases to the 1.5C agreed in Paris will alter the world we live in for ever. The IPCC concludes that every fraction of a degree more will edge us towards tipping points that will leave deep scars on our planet.

“Scars.” The world has been warmer several times during the Holocene. And much hotter for quite a bit of the history of the Earth

While much has been said about the damage to weather patterns, crop yields and coral reefs, less well understood is the effect a hotter world has on our health. The reality is that the climate crisis is the biggest health crisis of our time, bigger even than Covid-19.

Heat-related deaths are expected to treble by 2050. Currently 7 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution, more than the death toll during the entire pandemic.

What if they don’t triple? Who is held responsible for this scaremongering? Further, air pollution is not ‘climate change’. It is not from greenhouse gases. The cult is distracting from dealing with real environmental issues.

There has been a rise in chronic diseases linked to air pollution, and evidence suggests it is driving up cancer rates, too. Lung cancer and respiratory-related deaths linked to air pollution are up 160% over the past 30 years and it causes genetic mutations in some lung cancer-linked genes.

Again, not climate. I wish I could find that article I read last week about the cult distracting from real environmental issues.

The toll on loved ones, public health and the economy is large and rising. It has been estimated that poor health costs the global economy 15% of global GDP. It is not only oil companies, carmakers and airlines at fault. Healthcare alone contributes 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, up to 8% in advanced economies.

ZOMG, healthcare is also bad for the climate emergency!

Like it or not, regulatory requirements are moving towards stopping companies selling products that are not sustainable. In Japan we have converted paper leaflets to e-leaflets for all our products, reducing costs, simplifying operations and saving 180 tonnes of waste and 30m tonnes of paper – the equivalent of 4,500 trees.

But companies cannot act alone. Together we must make public health more resilient, so that it can cope with change and become truly accessible. A forum such as the Sustainable Markets Initiative established by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, convening stakeholders from across industries, is a good example of collaboration to take shared action at scale.

In other words, authoritarianism.

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 11, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…is a field that would be perfect for a solar farm, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Political Hat, with a post on designated oppression.

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Brandon Admin Looks To Push Allies To Up Pressure On Russia Over Ukraine Or Something

By William Teach April 11, 2023 – 10:30 am

Do people really care that much anymore? It’s barely in the news and people have other concerns. What’s happening in Ukraine really doesn’t affect them that much

U.S. aims to rally allies to up pressure on Russia, shore up Ukraine support

The U.S. government will seek to rally allies this week to ratchet up economic pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and shore up support for Kyiv, a top U.S. Treasury official is slated to say on Monday.

I love how it’s “the US government”, rather than the Biden administration. It’s almost like the media forgets who’s president

Treasury Undersecretary Jay Shambaugh will underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine in a speech at the Brookings Institution as global finance officials gather in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, according to excerpts obtained by Reuters.

It’s wavering. We The People have mostly checked out on sending money and arms

Shambaugh, who traveled to Kyiv with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in February, said current inflationary pressures could not be separated from the war and its economic spillovers.

It barely makes a difference for the U.S. All that money could have been used to help Americans. Well, except for quite a few of the sanctions on Russia, which do not really seem to be hurting Russia, just nations that deal with Russia.

“The United States is redoubling our efforts to rally our global coalition of allies at the Spring Meetings on Treasury’s two lines of effort as part of the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine,” he said in the prepared remarks. That means “shoring up economic support for Ukraine’s government and people, and … continuing to deny (Russian President Vladimir) Putin the revenue and military equipment he needs to further his illegal war.”

In other words, the allies in this are getting squishy.

“Looking ahead, Ukraine will need support from a broad set of donors as its recovers and rebuilds. As an international community, we can coalesce around meeting the most urgent and concrete needs — high-impact areas that can help Ukraine restart its economy and bring home displaced Ukrainians as conditions permit,” he said.

Um, Ukraine hasn’t won, and they are nowhere close to winning. Not by a longshot.

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We Must Ban Superyachts To Stop ‘Climate Change’

By William Teach April 11, 2023 – 7:00 am

The NY Times is all in a lather over the superyachts of billionares. Of course, what would actually happen is that the fossil fueled boats of the average person would end up being banned

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to improve our collective climate morale and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice, from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

Does anyone really need to own one of these? Who cares? It’s none of anyone else’s business, but, members of the climate cult feel the need to tell Other People who to live their lives and spend their money. But, I will give Joe Fassler, a food and environmental issues “reporter” credit for noting that it’s time to take on the “carbon aristocracy” and their climahypocrisy.

Joe goes into all the megayachts and private jets owned and taken by the Elites, leading to

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

As the old Glenn Reynolds saying goes “I’ll start believing it’s a crisis when those who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis (to which I add) in their own lives.” The Elites keep telling us we need to Do Something, preferably by government fiat, yet, they’re the worst offenders

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges, to some extent, on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

If you’re doctor tells you to lose weight, yet, he or she is fat and smokes, do you listen? I’ll still give Joe points for going after the Elites, but, he loses a few for pushing government authoritarianism. However, this is all a bunch of mule fritters when it comes to climate apocalypse. However, when it comes to real environmental issues, yest, they are very much polluting.

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