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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
Really excellent observation. Well done.
There was no hook. Or rather, the Left long ago went so deep into self-parody that the hook is hard to see.
If you had a time machine and took a current episode of “The View” back 25 years and showed it on “Saturday Night Live”, you would be a comedic legend. Particularly if it was one of the episodes where Whoopi characterizes the Holocaust as non-racial.
Same thing in Vermont – Hydro Quebec was causing environmental impacts of one kind or another. So it’s bad, no matter what, unless it’s solar, which is super-clean and has no downside.
Pick your poison. But I’m very confident the same people complaining about the mix of electrical generation are the same people who call the power company within seconds of their power going out.
A barrel of oil has 25,000 hours of labor in it. It’s ready to go 24/7. It’s probably severely underpriced in that sense. All fossil fuels have similar utility. If you are not going to use them, that is what you are up against. Even if you wanted to use nuke for everything, you can’t make electric cars work as well. You would have to do staggering overhauls of the whole electrical infrastructure.
Supposedly, they could have put five more dams in the Sierra Nevada for electricity and water. Instead, they are told to tolerate rolling blackouts and water shortages.
Then throw in all of the global money printing.
I just got done listening to Dennis Prager interview David Horowitz. They don’t care if anything makes any sense as long as it increases the control over the masses and resources.
The power shortages in Southern California are the fault of Pacific Gas and Electric, and have nothing to do with the virtual moratorium on new power generation capacity by the government.
Outer Party members will be allowed to drive a subcompact. Inner Party members will get a Mercedes or Jag or Lexus. And then there will be the tiered housing arrangements, dining and shopping….
In the old days of the USSR, the top guys only had a living standard 6 times the lowest level. Now look at what it’s like EVERYWHERE, especially if you subtract out transfer payments.
Do the people who build the cars get cars? Maybe they’ll be built by robots.
Do the people who build the robots get cars?
I’d like to see that quantified – don’t believe it for second.
All they got was a vacation home, a fat salary, better medical, and a driver. They got to shop at the better stores for party members. I suppose if they played all of the politics right, nobody kept track of their time and what they were doing.
The standard of living was really bad at the end, too. The denominator of the equation was really low.
American supermarkets had better food–and vastly more variety–than the Soviet stores reserved for Party members.
As best I recall (correct me if I’m wrong) Soviet automobiles were mediocre in reliability and performance (never mind styling.)
This is a minute and a half.
Grace needs help…a lot of help!
“That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty!”
Before the Bolsheviks took power, Russia was a net exporter of grain, and was sometimes called “the breadbasket of Europe.”
OK, I feel much better about Grace. Thanks for your investigative journalism, Percival.
I may be missing something, but he didn’t claim that Soviet top guys had a living standard 6 times the average American, he said 6 times the LOWEST level WITHIN the Soviet Union.
I don’t remember where I heard that. If you have a bad living standard, there’s only so many levels you can multiply that where it makes a substantial change.
What it was talking about was, back in the day, the concern wasn’t how well those guys lived, it was other things like the general standard of living and the scary police state. Even with that, they feared social chaos more than the police state. They would take the police state and an improvement in living standards. Today the oligarchs are obviously ridiculous.
I’m not even sure what that means. PG&E is a regulated utility, so the mix of sources is directed by or influenced by CPUC – they drive the bus, not PG&E (notwithstanding PG&E’s long standing record of colossal and dangerous infrastructure screw-ups).
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/california-electrical-energy-generation
Total energy generated is going down. That’s just the total screenshot below, the full mix by source is at the link.
California’s Integrated Resource plan – basically, the direction for sourcing of energy.
This is an “umbrella” planning proceeding to consider all of the Commission’s electric procurement policies and programs and ensure California has a safe, reliable, and cost-effective electricity supply. The proceeding is also the Commission’s primary venue for implementation of the Senate Bill (SB) 350 requirements related to integrated resource planning (IRP) (Public Utilities Code Sections 454.51 and 454.52). It will implement a process for integrated resource planning that will ensure that load serving entities (LSEs) meet targets that allow the electricity sector to contribute to California’s economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals.
Seems problematic. lol
Demand isn’t. Supply is. This leads to higher and higher prices. And rolling blackouts.