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October 2022

Hurricane Ian reveals another problem with electric vehicles: They explode after hurricanes By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/hurricane_ian_reveals_another_problem_with_electric_vehicles_they_explode_after_hurricanes.html

Joe Biden and all his minions have allowed gas prices to go sky high in a fanatic quest to force Americans into electric vehicles.

One problem: They tend to explode after hurricanes.

That’s what Fox News found, citing warnings from local authorities about this latest health hazard from the purveyors of those who vow to make America “go green”:

A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal. 

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

Which isn’t much of an enticement to purchase an electric car. How many gas-powered vehicles put on that kind of a show after a hurricane?

It goes to show more of the unintended consequences on the road to green Utopia — and why it’s impractical to force such changes without ever considering all the things a consumer might consider. Being able to get out of a disaster zone in a hurry is pretty important to a lot of people who buy cars.

Chief Heat Officers to the Rescue! Local government’s newest bureaucrat, the CHO is tasked with finding “natural” remedies for exposure to rising temperatures. Steven Malanga

https://www.city-journal.org/cities-hire-chief-heat-officers-to-address-climate-concerns

As the size and scope of government in America grows, cities are rapidly inventing new job titles. Recent examples: the algorithms management and policy officer, the director of digital equity, and the building decarbonization incentives manager—all real jobs. Now add to that list what is likely to be the hottest (pun intended) new job title at city hall: chief heat officer (CHO), also variously known as the extreme-weather coordinator or chief weather-resilience officer. If you’re surprised by these seemingly ludicrous titles, you haven’t been paying attention to the extent to which mainstream media run alarmist stories of soaring temperatures and their impact on urban life. They’ve helped turn the CHO, a job barely a year old, into a new staple of local government. These newly minted bureaucrats will make it their business to enumerate the impact of heat on the local population—an effect certain to increase now that government is counting it—and seek ways to mitigate it.

One phrase that you’re unlikely to hear much from these new bureaucrats: “air conditioning.” Warm-weather-related deaths dropped precipitously over the last century around much of the industrialized world largely because what we fondly term AC became widely available. But air conditioning demands electricity, most often powered by fossil fuels or nuclear energy, two increasingly unseemly phrases within government circles in places like California, where cities are rushing to hire CHOs. So instead, it seems, the job of these new bureaucrats will be to find carbon-neutral solutions to summer in the city.

The rise of the CHO has just reached a notable milestone: heat officers from cities around the world recently gathered for an Extreme Heat Resilience Conference in Washington, D.C.—a place that, before the invention of air conditioning, was so uncomfortable in the summer that British diplomats assigned there could draw tropical-assignment bonus pay. Much on the minds of the CHOs assembled in Washington was a new alarmist report on the impact of heat on cities, which begins, “The world is burning. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration.” (Actually, it is.) Consumed by the report’s warnings, CHOs plan a series of initiatives, one of which revolves around a popular new phrase in urbanism: “tree canopy,” referring to how much tree shade exists in a neighborhood. CHOs are looking to expand their cities’ tree canopies, though they will have to do so judiciously—studies show that tree shade is not evenly distributed in many municipalities, where poorer neighborhoods have apparently been shortchanged. In fact, Syracuse is spending $2 million in federal grant money to survey its tree canopy and increase natural shade in underserved neighborhoods, with the apparent intent of righting past shading wrongs.

A Comprehensive Roundup Of Official Energy Madness Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-5-a-comprehensive-roundup-of-official-energy-madness

“Meanwhile, the Biden people have spent the last several days begging OPEC for more production, only to have OPEC announce that it is cutting production instead. And this morning, the Wall Street Journal reports that Biden is planning loosening sanctions on Venezuela to permit the importation of more crude from there. If our country were in the hands of its worst enemies, it is hard to imagine what they would do differently.”

At this website, I try to give readers a steady flow of the latest instances of official energy madness, the ongoing efforts of our politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists to undermine and destroy the energy infrastructure that is the basis for our prosperity and our comfortable lives. But if you just read these examples one by one, however outrageous they may be individually, you can lose track of the overall picture. In the big picture, our government, aided and abetted by academics and journalists, is conducting a full scale war on the energy sector of the economy.

Now comes along a guy named Joseph Toomey, who has published a relatively long piece at RealClearEnergy with the title “Energy Inflation Was By Design.” Toomey is identified as a “career management consultant” in the energy field, and author of a 2014 book with the title “An Unworthy Future,” that critiqued the Obama administration’s energy policies. Other than that, Toomey has not been a regular contributor to the energy policy debates. But he makes up for an extended absence with this comprehensive roundup.

At 35 pages in length, Toomey’s piece is a seemingly endless litany of one intentionally destructive policy after another. Even if you follow this issue regularly, as I do, you can’t help but be astounded when you see the full extent of the destruction organized into one piece. An energy infrastructure built up over a century and more that actually provides reliable and affordable energy to millions of people — a true miracle of human ingenuity! — is being systematically and intentionally attacked and wrecked by ignorant fools who have no idea how difficult the existing system was to create, and equally have no idea how to make something to replace it that might actually work.

Republicans offer a real healthcare alternative By Sally Pipes

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/republicans-offer-a-real-healthcare-alternative

With their Commitment to America , Republicans have departed significantly from Democrats ‘ big government agenda. Nowhere is that clearer than on healthcare.

Over the last few years, progressives have made clear their intention to replace the market-based healthcare system with a single, government-run insurance program. Republicans ‘ Commitment to America, by contrast, seeks to improve the current system by introducing greater choice, transparency, and competition. That’s largely what the public wants from healthcare policy. A recent Echelon Insights poll sponsored by the organization I lead, the Pacific Research Institute, found that 86% of people are satisfied with their current health plan.

To the extent they are dissatisfied, the survey revealed that high premiums, deductibles, and copays — and overly restrictive access to doctors — are largely to blame. In other words, patients are looking for reforms that make the current system more affordable while removing the red tape that gets between them and their doctors. That’s what the GOP is pitching. Look at the recommendations of the party’s Healthy Future Task Force, which were released in June. Among other things, they propose to make coverage more portable and expand access to tax-advantaged health savings accounts.

Cybersecurity Awareness: Chuck Brooks

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cybersecurity-awareness-chuck-brooks

With another National Cybersecurity Awareness Month upon us, few major things have changed from the past year in terms of threats. As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions from malware and hackers. The cyber- threat actor ecosystem has grown in both size and sophistication. They are also openly collaborating in sharing targets. And tools. The cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration.

Achieving a full awareness of nefarious actors who operate in the cyber realm and protecting against their capabilities is an arduous task. Clearly, industry cannot respond to growing cyber-threats alone, especially for small and medium businesses who lack the resources and expertise. Increased government and industry cooperation to meet those challenges is a viable course to help mitigate threats and challenges. It is a proven risk management model that makes good sense. In several areas.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration. Sharing such information helps allow both government and industry to keep abreast of the latest viruses, malware, phishing threats, ransomware, and insider threats. Information sharing also establishes working protocols for lessons-learned and resilience that is critical for the success of commerce and the enforcement against cyber-crimes.

Both Solar Winds and the Colonial pipeline breaches highlighted the government’s assistance in mitigating breaches and moving toward resilience. Government was directly collaborating with the companies to discover the extent of the breaches and options for amelioration.

Remediation of breaches is important to continuity; no matter what, breaches will happen. The incorporation of best practices and the lessons learned from the various and many corporate breaches over the past few years is certainly valuable data for both industry and government in terms of prevention, recovery, and continuity.

It’s Always About Iran (Even when it’s about Palestinians) Shoshana Bryen

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2022/10/07/it-is-always-about-iran/

Lest you think Israel is waging war on the Palestinian people or the Palestinian Authority—the nominal government of the West Bank territory—it is not. The P.A. is under siege by Iranian-supported Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and P.A. strongman Mahmoud Abbas is thoroughly incapable of defending the government or the people. He is looking to Israel to save him and his regime. And Israel, to the extent it can, will try.

To call the relationship complicated is a severe understatement, but it always, always goes back to Iran.

On the one hand, the P.A. is corrupt to its eyeballs, and increasingly, its own people have been protesting the regime’s failures; it is hugely repressive—it jailed people for their Facebook posts, and killed regime critic and journalist Nizar Banat; and it incites violence against Israel and Jews as a way to maintain its revolutionary credentials.

At the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas lauded “the righteous martyrs of the Palestinian people who enlightened the path of freedom and independence with their pure blood.” The Fatah website has been calling for violence against Israelis, and more than once Abbas has announced he is abrogating all the P.A. agreements with Israel—including those regarding security cooperation. But that’s only until he needs security cooperation with the IDF to survive.

Which is the other hand for him and for Israel.

In the midst of rumbling unrest among West Bank Palestinians, Abbas is facing the latest round of the Hamas-Fatah civil war that began after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and ended with the expulsion of the P.A. from Gaza in 2007. With no Israel and no Fatah inside Gaza, Hamas won security control of the area—which should be a warning against a precipitous Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. With Iran as a patron, Hamas has since determined the level of aggression that would be used against Israel—and against Fatah.

Eleven Realities About Trump vs. DeSantis: Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/eleven-realities-about-trump-vs-desantis/

Most think it likely that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will run against a probable candidate Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. If so, we can expect the following:

1) DeSantis will run on the Trump MAGA agenda. There will be no challenge on the major issues. There will be no Never Trump return, no Romneyism redux, no Liz Cheney-like recalibration of the Republican Party.

2) DeSantis cannot argue that his superb governorship gives him superior executive experience over Trump, given that Trump’s four years saw historic successes. And vice-versa. Instead, the race will hinge on two considerations: Trump will argue that DeSantis is his own copied automaton (e.g., “I made him”) and yet lacks Trump’s fire-in-the-belly combativeness, so necessary to challenge the leftwing destruction of our institutions. DeSantis will fire back that he will “get even not mad.” That is, his attacks on Disney or Martha’s Vineyard are laser-focused, shorn of puerile put-downs, cul-de-sac extraneous tweets, and narcissistic fixations with past grievances and hurts.

3) Trump will assert charisma; DeSantis competence. Each will try to combine both as Reagan did. But can Trump run or govern without the psychodramas of being surrounded by shysters like the Mooch or Omarosa, or the volatility of a Bannon or Roger Stone?

4) Alternatively, can DeSantis turn out 40,000 in an open-air rally in early February?

5) We know Trump from his presidency, but will we know him at age 78-79? Is he as alert and savvy and cunning as he was nine or ten years earlier? And in the debates, will DeSantis prove dazzling or more a 2016 Scott Walker, a figure with a similarly superb record of state governance, a willingness to take on the teacher unions and the Left, and someone who exuded executive competence—before he melted down on the debate stage?

What Becomes of the F.B.I.? Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/what-becomes-of-the-fbi/

“…..But from the Boston bombers to the San Bernadino terrorists, the FBI habitually drops leads that are handed to it. It is far more effective going after moms and Christians than it is pursuing known Islamic terrorists who kill and maim Americans.”

Can the FBI be saved in its present form? Should it be disassembled, and its bureaus farmed out to other agencies? Should its headquarters be transferred to Kansas City, or maybe Fresno, Dayton, or Boise? Given its record of transgressions and lapses, would we miss its absence?

Or are its Washington hierarchies intrinsically too intermarried with the swamp, too embedded within it, and too compliant in general to the deep state, and the leftwing cultural Washington elite, and the Democratic party to be salvaged?

Is it not striking how the FBI under intense scrutiny and criticism, nonetheless ups its performance-art raiding, its perp-walking, its politicized hounding, its obsequiousness to Merrick Garland’s renegade DOJ?

Are the FBI kingpins delighted with the rightwing criticism—as if to be giddy that they have gotten under the skins of conservatives, terrified them, and thus created a new deterrence? Or is it just FBI bullying, as if Wray et al. are saying, “Yeah, we became weaponized, what exactly are you going to try to do about it?”

Or is it convinced the Left has its back for any and everything, given it can streamline social justice agendas and DNC objectives by fiat?

Thought of the Day “Is Goldilocks Dead Politically?” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Goldilocks was very tired by this time; she went upstairs to the bedroom. She lay down on the first bed, but it was too hard. Then she lay on the second bed, but it was too soft.Then she lay down on the third bed and it was just right. Goldilocks fell  asleep. Robert Southey (1774-1843)   The Three Bears, 1837

                                                                                                            

It is the Goldilocks search for the right balance between too much government and individual freedom that foments so much political division: Have Washington’s entitlements and its marriage with social media made government intrusive? Has defunding the police, and the subsequent rising street crime caused us to become anarchial?  

No matter one’s political leanings, we all recognize the importance of federal government: to provide defense against foreign enemies; to maintain civil order at home; to care for those unable to care for themselves; to permit and encourage interstate commerce and transportation; to provide an agency to collect taxes and fees; to have a legislature to enact laws, an executive to carry them out, and a court system to adjudicate differences. At the same time, we believe in the ideals of independence and self-reliance, that we are individuals, free to think, speak, write, assemble, and pray as we will. Our differences are where we place ourselves along those dual (and sometimes dueling) spectrums, of government dependency and individual freedom. As government expands, freedom shrinks.

Political differences, driven by identity politics and ad hominem attacks, have become so venomous that a Cato Institute poll in July 2020 showed that 62% of Americans feel they cannot freely express their political preferences. Would anyone argue that number has lessened in the last two years? Most affected are conservatives (77%), then moderates (64%), and liberals (52%). The only group willing to freely express itself are “staunch” liberals, at 58 percent, not a surprise given their support from mainstream media. However, a New York Times/Sienna College poll taken last March found that 84% of Americans said being afraid to exercise freedom of speech is a “serious problem.”

US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18904/us-intelligence-warning-china-escalating

One of the organizations that US intelligence explicitly warned against is the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which describes itself as a “national people’s organization engaged in people-to-people diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China.”

In reality, the organization is a front for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign influence efforts. It has been operating successfully in the US for decades, especially by forging numerous sister-city relationships with US cities to influence local US political, business, media, and educational leaders. There are more than two hundred sister city pairs and fifty sister state/province partnerships between the US and China. Such partnerships, according to US intelligence, can also include business, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges between U.S. and Chinese communities.

China uses the same tactics when it comes to US business leaders: In 2021, “the PRC Embassy in Washington sent letters to select U.S. business leaders urging them to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject bills the PRC opposed, including bills designed to increase U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China….

[T]hese politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed. The focus is typically on economic and cultural ties and it’s easy to pretend that there is no political element… however, these local ties are in fact highly political…. This is the tactic of ‘use the countryside to surround the city'”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, 2021

China is doubling down on its efforts to influence state and local government leaders in the United States by exploiting the existing web of regional and local US-China relations, one of the main US intelligence agencies, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), warned in July.