Tag: Good News

Return To Common Sense?

Corporate Wokism

Reader Mike L. sent me this article about Walmart:

On Monday Walmart confirmed that it’s ending some of its diversity initiatives, removing some LGBTQ-related merchandise from its website and winding down a nonprofit that funded programs for minorities.

The nation’s largest employer, which has about 1.6 million U.S. workers, joined a growing list of companies that have stepped back from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts after feeling the heat from conservative activists.

Some have also attributed changes to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down affirmative action programs at colleges.

Those companies include Tractor Supply, which said in June it was eliminating DEI roles and stopping sponsorship of Pride festivals. Lowe’s, Ford and Molson Coors have also walked back some of their equity and inclusion policies in recent months.

Others, such as Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light and Target, have faced sharp backlash and falling sales after marketing campaigns or merchandise focused on the LGBTQ community.

In a statement, Walmart said it is “willing to change alongside our associates and customers who represent all of America.”

…followed by the usual weasel corporate-speak about “being a Walmart for everyone”  blah blah blah.

One would like to think that such a rethink involved realizing that at its heart, the whole “Diversity/Equity/Inclusion” initiative was anything but a vehicle for racial- and sexual inequality, but the reality is that the policy reversal was caused by the economic consequences of customer backlash and revulsion.  (Jaguar, of course, has responded to such a reaction to its latest marketing campaign by calling its customers and the public in general hateful and intolerant — we’ll see what happens, but pretty much any fule can predict disaster… for Jaguar.)

And yes, the political ethos has changed as well:

All of a sudden (the Socialists think), what was okay is now somehow not okay.  In the past, we made jokes about it:

…and all of a sudden, they think, it’s not okay.

Except that it’s not “all of a sudden”.  Most of us have never thought all this woke nonsense was “okay”, but then something happened:

And to paraphrase Forrest Gump:  “…and just like that, everything changed.”

Of course, those in the path of this new change are worried and are calling for “moderation” and “bipartisanship”, except:

So:

The change is not just going to come with the destruction of the Deep State (a political institution), but also in the Woke Mindset (a cultural one).

It’s been a long (too long a) time coming, but it’s about time now.

Goodbye, Witchcraft

Eco-Crap, Good Stuff, Science!

If you look at all my posts about Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© over the years, you will see all the following points appear at some time or another.

1. The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.
2. Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
3. The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
4. The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
5. Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual.
6. Climate models are inherently incapable of telling us anything about how much global warming there will be or about whether or to what extent the warming has a natural or anthropogenic cause.
7. Global warming will likely continue to be slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial.
8. There is broad agreement among the scientific community that extreme weather events have not increased in frequency, intensity or duration and are in future unlikely to do so.
9. Though global population has increased fourfold over the past century, annually averaged deaths attributable to any climate-related or weather-related event have declined by 99%.
10. Global climate-related financial losses, expressed as a percentage of global annual gross domestic product, have declined and continue to decline notwithstanding the increase in built infrastructure in harm’s way.
11. Despite trillions of dollars spent chiefly in Western countries on emissions abatement, global temperature has continued to rise since 1990.
12. Even if all nations, rather than chiefly western nations, were to move directly and together from the current trajectory to net zero emissions by the official target year of 2050, the global warming prevented by that year would be no more than 0.05 to 0.1 Celsius.
13. If the Czech Republic, the host of this conference, were to move directly to net zero emissions by 2050, it would prevent only 1/4000 of a degree of warming by that target date.
14. Based pro rata on the estimate by the UK national grid authority that preparing the grid for net zero would cost $3.8 trillion (the only such estimate that is properly-costed), and on the fact that the grid accounts for 25% of UK emissions, and that UK emissions account for 0.8% of global emissions, the global cost of attaining net zero would approach $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ global annual GDP.
15. On any grid where the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power exceeds the mean demand on that grid, adding any further wind or solar power will barely reduce grid CO2 emissions but will greatly increase the cost of electricity and yet will reduce the revenues earned by both new and existing wind and solar generators.
16. The resources of techno-metals required to achieve global net zero emissions are entirely insufficient even for one 15-year generation of net zero infrastructure, so that net zero is in practice unattainable.
17. Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generatedthan any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.
18. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.
Okay, there may be a couple in there that I didn’t write (e.g. #13), but I think you get the gist.
As it happened, the above came from a gathering of actual scientists in Prague.  These are actual scientists, as opposed to a bunch of gloomy watermelons subsidized by Leftist governments and universities.
I expect the response from the Fainting Goats On The Left will be the usual mix of screams, character assassination and assorted hysteria.
From right-thinking people, however, the response will just be nods of agreement and approval.

Worth Knowing

SHTF, The Gun Thing

From Friend & Longtime Reader JCinPA:

I’ve been handicapping the probability of widespread violence around the election—I mean as in nationwide—for a couple of years and now I believe any sentient person knows it is now virtually 100%. The only question remaining is which side wins the election, that will determine which side kicks off the festivities, but we will have festivities.

For any of your readers who are not firearms enthusiasts (there must be 1 or 2?), you may want to put this out as a public service announcement. Good condition S&W police surplus revolvers. Add $50-75 for s&h and processing, but in the unlikely event someone has no weapon and is now regretting that fact, these are the ticket for the non-shooter.

Along with four to five 5-gal water bottles and some 4patriot food packs, it’s time to get prepared.

All good advice and two good links.  Thankee, my friend.

I actually added some supplies to the SHTF cupboard a day or two ago, for no apparent reason.  Hadn’t done it for a while, but something must have been tickling my antenna.  And I don’t think I’m the only one…

Straining The Influx, Flushing The Excess

Immigration

When it comes to immigration policy, there are a few options available to you as the host country if the floodgates have been opened too far and the influx starts to threaten the fabric of the settled society.

You can strain the influx of future immigration — not putting stress on — by tightening the restrictions, or setting higher standards for what constitutes an “acceptable” immigrant.  Many countries have done this in the past, whether the sieve was academic (minimum education standards such as eighth-grade-, twelfth-grade- or even graduate levels), skills (tradespeople or industry-savvy applicants such as carpenters, steelworkers, forestry specialists or computer programmers), and finally financial:  people who have been successful in their home countries and raised their standard of living to the point where their arrival into the host country will not require financial assistance from the government or charity organizations and may in fact become employment creators.  (One more is military service for younger men and perhaps women, too, but this approach is fraught with potential problems, which is why the .dotmil generally has fairly strict standards for foreign recruits, or else has a savage, no-nonsense approach to assimilation like the French Foreign Legion.)

When a nation like the Netherlands decides to apply tighter standards or even close entry altogether, you have to realize that even for the famously-tolerant Dutch, immigration has put too much of a stress on their society, both financial and more especially to their culture.  Which is what is happening over there:

Prime Minister Dick Schoof has promised to take a tougher line against illegal immigration. The Dutch four-party cabinet has pledged to establish ‘the strictest asylum regime ever known’ to curb immigration.”

The surge in the number of immigrants seeking asylum in the Netherlands, estimated at around 40,000 a year, has put severe pressure on public services from housing to healthcare, fueling growing concerns about the country’s ability to manage the influx.

The ruling coalition in the Netherlands, which includes Geert Wilders-led Freedom Party, has taken a tough stance on immigration. The party is known for its controlled immigration stances, and has been one of the key drivers behind proposals to tighten asylum laws in the country.

Measures on the table include limiting applications for international protection, speeding up deportations and restricting family reunification for refugees under much stricter conditions.

The Dutch government, by the way, is not doing this voluntarily.  Whereas the neo-socialist political parties had pretty much universal control of the polity in the past, the election of hardliners like the party of Geert Wilders has changed the political landscape, and government ministers now say things like “a clear mandate from the voters” when framing a tougher immigration policy.

The depth of feeling on this topic is that the Dutch, always the most quiescent of members of the European Union, are now stating quite bluntly that in order for them to enact these new immigration controls, they have to have control of their own borders — ditto the Germans, by the way — but the Dutch are even showing open willingness to leave the EU altogether if such control is denied them.

Note too that the Dutch government is framing this issue purely in terms of financial necessity, and are not touching the issue of non-assimilation.  But the Dutch, always cosmopolitan a nation, are undoubtedly looking northward to see what the (also famously-tolerant) Swedes are doing:

Sweden’s migration policy is undergoing a paradigm shift. The Government is intensifying its efforts to reduce… the number of migrants coming irregularly to Sweden. Labour immigration fraud and abuses must be stopped and the ‘shadow society’ combated. Sweden will continue to have dignified reception standards, and those who have no grounds for protection or other legal right to stay in Sweden must be expelled.

And that’s not a news organization speaking:  it’s from the Swedish government itself.

By “shadow society” they mean Muslim enclaves, who insist on setting up their own little state-within-a-state pretty much wherever they arrive, and whose establishment was made easy by Sweden’s traditional tolerance.  Ditto the many crime organizations and drug cartels, who up until now have had it relatively easy.

Well, it appears that this tolerance has reached its limits, and because the Swedes prefer orderliness over chaos, they’re prepared to do what has to be done:  reduce the influx, and expel the unwanted (being Swedes, they’ll pay these assholes over $30,000 each to leave, which gives you an idea of how much the unwanted immigrants are costing the government in terms of aid and policing).

It is in this light that we should look homeward, and think about Donald Trump’s promise that upon election, we’ll see the largest domestic deportation in history.

Let’s hope, and hope still more that when he reaches the Oval Office, this promise doesn’t suffer the fate of that “big, beautiful wall” from his last presidential campaign.