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My Government, My Election System, and My Kitchen
Charles C.W. Cooke, writing in today’s National Review about the Biden Administration’s plan to ban gas stoves, quoted the apparatchik in charge of the relevant agency as making the following, remarkably stupid, statement:
Justifying the administration’s proposed move, CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. explained that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” What, I wonder, would be excluded from that definition?
Very good question, Charles. A few years ago one of my elderly patients was parking her car at a grocery store and bonked into something. She said she was barely moving, but her airbag deployed, breaking her arm. So airbags are dangerous, right? Well, yes they are, but they can also save your life. But since they “can’t be made safe” we should ban them, right, Comrade Trumka Jr?
Richard Trumka Jr. was appointed Commissioner of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission by President Biden. You might think that Mr. Trumka Jr. might be uncomfortable with tyrannical power structures, controlling people through the threat of force. You would be mistaken. His father, Richard Trumka Sr., was the president of The United Mine Workers, and later he was president of the AFL-CIO. So it runs in the family, I guess.
Which means that a Democrat president owed a favor to a union thug who helped him get elected, so now I have to change how I cook supper.
Our government is simply out of control.
Just imagine what our founders would think of this. Heck, imagine what FDR would think of this. This is bonkers.
Our government is so insane that it’s hard to envision what it was before, or how we got here.
This is absolutely bonkers.
Published in General
Mr. Trumpka doesn’t need data. He has an agenda. Data would only get in his way.
Very, very good point.
It’s not about finding “clean energy” and letting us use that. It’s about not letting us use any energy. All energy is bad.
How could I do that? Thanks for the reality check, Percival. For one second I actually took a government official for his word, rather than knowing that there was an underlying alternate agenda to what they were saying.
There is always a progressive agenda at work in every government action.
From the same thread
LED lightbulbs have a different spectrum than incandescent. And many, if not all, are heavy in the blue or blue-green range, which is conducive to setting your body to keeping you awake. Incandescents are in the red-yellow range which is conducive to sleep. If you’re using the blue-range bulbs in the evening or night, it prevents you from getting drowsy and going to sleep. Not healthy. That’s what I’ve read at least.
And Newsom who is pioneering this.
Of Note: banning gas means that we will all be that much more dependent on our power companies, you know, the ones that keep failing when it gets too hot or cold. It is hard not to think that the government wants to do to utilities what they’ve done to ‘health care’.
I still like the meme, “Cooking with Wind” but I’m not sure which wind they’re talking about.
I suspect they are going to get far more resistance to this than they anticipate. A lot of streaming shows are cooking shows and people who watch them aspire to greater kitchens themselves. That includes all manner of gas ovens, stoves, and variants.
Manchin just called it out as stupid. So . . . there’s that.
Of Note: Those early corkscrew bulbs had mercury in them. Our government essentially mandated we store poison in the thinnest of glass containers all throughout our living space.
Heck, they’ve spent two years mandating we store poison in our own bodies.
I think I found the “experts” who helped Trumka Jr. figure this all out:
It is better. In contrast to electrics, gas stoves don’t waste fuel warming up and they don’t stay dangerously hot very long after the burners are turned off.
Wonder how these guys vote.
California frequently tells people they can’t burn because of ‘air quality’.
Hmm, well maybe there is something to that brain damage claim.
Get “warm” color temperature LED bulbs.
Now that New York Governor Hochul has added her idiotic intent to ban all natural gas appliances, I wanted to pile onto Comment #68 above by @marcin that powering everything with a single energy source (electricity) is risky. With gas, a resident has options.
In places like most of New York state, which has actual weather that sometimes gets violent, electric supply lines fail. We lived in western New York for 18 years. Although our neighborhood’s electric supply lines were underground (safe from weather), the feeder lines to our neighborhood were above ground, and failed during some weather events. Many parts of town had the combination of mature trees and above-ground electric lines that made for frequent power outages. Many of our friends and neighbors had natural gas powered generators for those eventualities. For a few people those gas powered generators had been installed to run critical medical equipment.
As Marci notes, with a gas stove you can at least cook some food when the power fails (including the food in the refrigerator that would otherwise spoil while the power’s out). Although our gas furnace depended on electricity to ignite and to run its fan, we could use the gas fireplace for heat when the electric power was out.
We now live in Texas, in a house that is all-electric. There is no retail natural gas available in the subdivision (though ironically there are several lots at the corner of the subdivision that will always remain empty because a high volume natural gas transport pipeline runs under them). I would have liked gas in the house, but the other features of the house and the neighborhood left this house as the best overall option in the balancing of trade-offs (see Dr. Thomas Sowell – there are no solutions, only trade-offs). We have adjusted to cooking on the glass top electric stove, and Mrs. Tabby does like the easy cleaning of the smooth glass cooktop.
Yes. Cooking a salad?
Do they make them? And what does warm mean? I know that my wife has been putting modern lightbulbs in the kitchen and all the meat looks dark and brownish because they have so little of the red spectrum.
Mrs. Tabby was showing me earlier today an interview with a restaurant owner who claimed that having to cook on electric stoves significantly cut his kitchen productivity relative to cooking on gas stoves. He didn’t fully explain it, but I’m guessing the additional time for an electric burner to get to cooking temperature as compared to the instant response of a gas burner, while a small inconvenience to the home cook, becomes a big issue for restaurant cooks who have to deal with it hundreds of times a day.
Yes.
https://www.lumens.com/the-edit/the-guides/understanding-kelvin-color-temperature/
I find it odd that you are willing to supply “reasonably” to the quotation on one side of this argument, but that you’re unwilling to be similarly generous to Charlie Cooke. I’ve read much of Cooke’s writing, and I can assure you that he is well aware of Commerce Clause jurisprudence and that he understands what the Court has ruled over the years. But he’s also an opinion writer, and he makes a compelling argument that the proposal from Mr. Trumka was not based on some reasonableness standard of safety. Rather, it was a colossally stupid idea that should be nowhere near a properly functioning government’s regulatory priorities. Just because a law might pass (legitimate) constitutional muster does not make it any more wise or any less oppressive.
Perhaps this was just a trial balloon. They wanted to see how we’d react. To see if they could get away with this. Don’t think they won’t try similarly stupid things. It’s all about control and turning us into a weaker nation.
I’m OK with the LEDs. The whole thing was totally insane and wrong when they were using those stupid fluorescent lights. So the government forced it and maybe it worked out.
There is one other factor about this though. I read an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about these lights. One of the things they don’t know because it’s impossible to do decent experiments about it is, what about the heat given off by the incandescent lights in the winter? You use light more in the winter, so they know that the furnace is going to come on more when you use non-incandescents. So you have to subtract a certain amount off of what is saved from the LED, but they don’t know what that amount is.
The Creepy Cult Surrounding the Gas Stove Panic Gets Exposed
Well, in fairness, she could be sauteeing spinach…
Perhaps the Dems should ban life because it always ends in death . . .