Liberals are Selective about Diversity

          The opinion section of the March 10, 2023 ICO featured the ICO DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) tribe out in full force, as is usual. It reminded me of the ICO’s aversion to diversity if such includes conservatives, since this year is the tenth anniversary of the ICO informing me that henceforth any letters I submitted of a “repetitive” nature would not be published in the ICO. I’ve collected many of my ICO rejects in a blog icocensored.blogspot.com. The only thing repetitive about them is that they offended the ICO’s liberal sensitivities. 

        Since many universities now mandate signing a DEI statement as a condition of employment, the ICO may soon require one to be published.

 

The ICO editorial lamented states’ policies concerning drag shows, favorite childhood books, and gender reassignment. About drag shows, I’m surprised that liberals don’t label them “cultural appropriation” in their quest to control intellectual activity. For example, one of my writing instructors, Myriam Gurba, accused Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, of not being a legitimate author because she is not “Latinx”. I guess that would also apply to Grapes of Wrath because Steinbeck wasn’t an Okie. 

 

About childhood entertainment, liberal banning includes some Dr. Suess books, Little House on the Prairie, Barbar, Curious George, Huckleberry Finn, and a personal favorite, Song of the South. 

 

Concerning gender reassignment, many public schools allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent, to follow federal and state student privacy guidance. I doubt parents are told that some school policies prohibit parents to be informed of significant issues if their child requests it. I also doubt that schools are competent in such issues and could easily do more harm than good. So much for choice belonging to “the person and their supportive parents.”

 

 

 

 

Veterans Health Administration is a failed single-payer system

On Memorial Day I’m writing this to protest the shabby treatment of fellow veterans and to challenge Liberal support for a single-payer health system.

“The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is America’s largest integrated health care system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year.” It is a single-payer system and has often been held up as a model by Obamacare supporters. Paul Krugman, Vouchers for Veterans, The New York Times, November 13, 2011, put down Mitt Romney’s veterans health privatization plan by touting the VHA as a socialized medicine success story.

Two years earlier, another Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote: “(The VHA) is fully government run, much more ‘socialized medicine’ than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.”

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote in 2009 that one of his favorite ideas was expanding VHA to non-veterans, and that the VHA was America’s best-functioning health system.

Nancy Pelosi was quick to blame the emerging VHA scandal on President Bush, speaking as if Democrats had no VHA responsibilities since Bush left office in 2009. 

However, in 2004 the left-leaning Rand Corporation found that: “(T)he VA system delivered higher-quality care than the national sample of private hospitals on all measures except acute care ... In nearly every other respect, VA patients received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and access to follow-up.”

The Rand Corporation reported that quality improved significantly 2007 to 2009, again during Bush’s presidency.

The VHA, like Obamacare, is another shining example of government incompetently competing with the private sector, and should be privatized. Our veterans deserve better treatment than politicians. 

Huge Benefits of Fossil Fuel

In our many and varied travels, Alice and I have seen the benefits of fossil fuel use, and the struggles to survive without it. For example, in Tanzania we saw a village that recently was aided by Rotary clubs donating a manually operated water pump, a great improvement over the previous need to carry water jugs great distances from the river. However, its users still hand-pumped the water, then carried water jugs instead of turning on a faucet in their homes.

We have many colorful pictures of women walking by the road with jugs, baskets, or bundles balanced on their heads, and not just in Africa. In Guatemala, India, and in rural areas of Southeast Asia bundles of firewood as well as jugs of water being carried by women and children were common sights. In these areas, the vast majority of the population relies on traditional biomass and waste, mostly firewood and dried cattle dung, for heating and cooking. With increasing populations, the walks to gather fuel get longer, and the air in homes and villages exceed our “spare the air” standard every day.

Given these observations of living lives without the abundant, easily accessed energy we take for granted, I wasn’t surprised by a recent study that found that “(T)he benefits of fossil fuel energy to society far outweigh the social costs of carbon (SCC) by a magnitude of 50 to 500 times.” 

It’s common sense, which unfortunately is not commonly found in the developed world. We would like to preserve the lives of peoples of the developing world in an imagined pristine Eden, and they would like to live like us.

We don’t want to live like them, yet are surprised they don’t either. With economic freedom, Bill Gates thinks by 2035 they won’t have to. 

Winds of Change?

I found this little poem I had written on a scrap of the February 2, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle.

An Ode to Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco Values

San Francisco values

Permeate your life

You claim exemplary virtue

While screwing your best friend’s wife.

After doing the obligatory alcohol rehab routine, he’s now Lieutenant Governor and Democrat leaders feel he’s bound for bigger and better leadership positions.

They’re probably right, although Wiener and Spitzer found less forgiveness than the typical Democrat candidate has come to expect.

So too Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Are winds of change blowing in Democrat politics?

Don't Buy "Chainsaw" Autos!

Many Mendonoma friends and neighbors still display “Don’t drink chainsaw wine” bumper stickers, which came to mind as I read a Spiegel article “Mutiny in the land of wind turbines.” 

To refresh our memories, “Chainsaw wine” refers to the now-defunct Preservation Ranch proposal to “plant 1,150 acres of premium, sustainably farmed vineyards on 1,769 acres” (9% of 19,645 acres), which ardent environmentalists fought by abstaining from consuming a non-existing product.

Ardent environmentalists also spear-head the movement in Germany to aggressively replace nuclear and fossil fuel electrical generation with wind power, and so far succeeded in boosting Germany’s electricity cost to $0.31/kWh compared to $0.08-$0.17/kWh in the US.  As wind turbines in Germany have to locate deeper into its interior, productivity per turbine falls to under a third of offshore turbines, while greatly increasing visual and noise pollution, lowering property values, and slaughtering birds, bats, and insects. These are all the typical unintended consequences of blind environmental idealism.

But there’s more: ironically, the increase in land-based wind turbines unleashes a vast chainsaw-wielding army to clear-cut trees for foundations, access roads, and power lines. The German state of Hesse alone plans to cut down forest acreage equal to over ten proposed Preservation Ranch vineyards, and North Rhine-Westphalia wants to do even more.

Since automobiles are the preeminent German export produced by intensive electrical energy exploitation, true environmentalists should join me in fighting the degradation of German forests and loss of CO2-sequestering trees by buying and displaying my bumper sticker “Don’t buy chainsaw automobiles©”.

Unlike “chainsaw wine”, German automobiles are real, not symbolic, and their production is causing real environmental degradation.

Save the world! Buy bumper stickers, not BMW’s!

Environmentalist Hypocrisy

The hypocrisy of environmentalists is humorous, particularly since they take themselves so seriously. A recent and ongoing example is the ban on Gualala Independence Day fireworks. Obviously, Gualala sea birds are more sensitive than Point Arena birds and require protection. But while the otherwise quite common Gualala sea birds don’t suffer momentary disturbance, environmentalists supported and heavily taxpayer-subsidized wind farms kill thousands of birds annually, many of which are rare and endangered birds of prey.

I laughed at a recent ICO cartoon: one of its characters was looking longingly at our wind-swept bluffs and envisioning a gargantuan wind turbine upon it. I think at various other times this cartoon has featured sea birds soaring over those bluffs, but hasn’t put together the birds soaring into the wind turbine blades yet.

At other times local environmentalists revolt at the prospect of the scenic pollution of offshore oil rigs (which because of advances in drilling techniques would be few in number and far apart) without regard for the large numbers of wind turbines it requires for a wind farm.

Of course, environmentalists give us intermittent, unreliable, and costly wind farms, plus the abomination of ethanol. Among its many taxpayer-subsidized shortcomings is that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it delivers, and takes food from the mouths of the poor. In a “fracking” article in this month’s National Geographic, environmentalists bemoaned the water needed for fracking, without noting that far more water (and natural gas for making fertilizer) is needed to grow the crops to make the ethanol. And, delicious irony of ironies, than the combustion of ethanol releases CO2, too, and so do the farming tractors, and the trucks that haul the corn, and the ethanol refineries.

Environmentalists require tunnel vision as they quest to save us all.

Mainstream Media is Hateful to Occupy

Criticizing Occupy activists is considered hateful, judging from responses to recent criticisms of Occupy in our local weekly newspaper, The Independent Coast Observer. Now it looks like the left-leaning Press Democrat should also be tagged “hateful” because of their November 28 editorial, “More muddled messages from Occupy folks”, which noted that the attempt to disrupt “Black Friday” shopping damaged Santa Rosa Occupy’s credibility and focus.

Occupy Wall Street’s national shopping boycott failed spectacularly, as Black Friday sales were up a record 7%, showing OWS has no clout as a national movement.

The ultra-left San Francisco Chronicle was “hateful” two weeks ago when in an editorial “Oakland says ‘enough’”, the Chronicle opined: “Oakland leaders finally acted decisively to remove a sprawling and unruly camp from the city's central downtown plaza. It was the right move, one that San Francisco should consider in responding to a similar tent city that's taken over an Embarcadero park.”

In another “hateful” editorial, the Chronicle concluded: “The Occupy movement is no longer  associated with protests over income inequality or Wall Street misconduct. Now it's about squalor and public safety, thanks largely to its nonexistent leadership and disorganization.”

What does OWS want? Income redistribution no doubt; having government take the rightful property of one group and give it to another, also known as theft. “When you take from Peter and give to Paul, you can count on Paul’s support.”

The rest of the OWS message is the usual Liberal hodgepodge of special interest issues, made particularly incoherent by its lack of leadership and direction. As OWS camps become full-time homeless camps and OWS activists flee their squalor – and Winter rain and freezing – the backlash by the media, municipalities, and weary voters will cause the Left to wish Occupy Wall Street never happened.

And as a coherent movement, it hasn’t.