Botswanans celebrate their independence from Great Britain with an official day on September 30.
Also, September 30 has served as Blasphemy Rights Day since 2009, when it was initiated by the Center for Inquiry.
Anticipating proposed SEC regulations, Newsom’s California is set to impose nonsensical mandates for reporting greenhouse gas emissions and “climate-related financial risk” that target companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more (according to the terms of SB253) and $500 million or more (SB261).
Billion-dollar businesses will have to report all direct and indirect emissions, including emissions produced throughout a business’s supply chain. Business travel. Employee commutes. Penalties for failure to report could be as high as $500,000.
The cost is in time, money, privacy, freedom, with no benefits except to bureaucrats and politicians who enjoy bossing us around and destroying our ability to function.
These requirements are tyrannical in the same way they’d be tyrannical if required of you and me as individuals.
Do you know all about the emissions produced in delivering the water, electricity, electronics, gas, paper you use each month?
Care to drop everything you’re doing to find out?
And submit the data in a bureaucrat-satisfying format?
We already know what the results of California’s experiment will be. We already know that crushing freedom and giving unfettered power to slave-masters is not the road to wealth and happiness.
What we don’t know is exactly how far the Tarnished State’s aspiring totalitarians will go. But whatever the consequences, they’ll blame others … or just mutter “Good riddance, we didn’t want that prosperity and those evil businesses anyway.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.
But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.
“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”
Fiction? No.
The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to … pretend … to prepare.
It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035.
Not 2030 as previously stated.
Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.
Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.
Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.
British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Their low-overhead, low-profit-margin Richmond company, Valancourt Books, founded in 2005, prints long unavailable volumes one at a time, as customers request them. To operate, the publishers must first carefully retype the books, often formerly available only in rare editions or even microfiches.
It’s two guys working out of their home doing everything. They profit only by keeping costs low.
By 2018, the Valancourt catalog listed over 400 books. That’s when the federal government came down upon the company like a ton of bricks. Invoking a 1790 copyright law, the U.S. Copyright Office demanded that Valancourt send it one copy each of hundreds of different books. Otherwise, they’d be fined up to $250 per book and further fines for “willfully or repeatedly” failing to comply.
The publishers’ choice was either spend thousands of dollars and lots of time printing and shipping the books — or be penalized out of existence. Instead of giving up, they turned to the Institute for Justice and went to court.
IJ argued that government “cannot simply force you to turn over personal property on pain of ruinous fines, and they cannot punish you for publishing a book without letting them know.”
Now, years later, IJ and Valancourt have won their case.
It’s a win for all small publishers who might otherwise have been ruined by the whims of bureaucrats at the Copyright Office. That it had to be litigated, however, is more evidence that freedom requires constant vigilance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“I’m not saying now’s the time to double down” on fossil fuels, pleads Lanny Nickel, chief operating officer of Southwest Power Pool, which helps provide electricity to 14 states. “I’m just saying now’s the time to slow down on the removal of [those] assets from our footprint.”
The assets Nickel means are oil, gas, coal.
Like others in the business of keeping the lights on, Nickel knows that if and when the percentage of fossil fuels in the utility industry “footprint” is coercively reduced to point oh one percent or whatever, wind and sunshine will not be taking up the slack.
We’ll suffer, instead, from lots more brownouts and blackouts.
Nickel understands this.
But begging regulators and politicians to go slower won’t discourage them. They’ll just gloat about how they’re making the utility executives sweat.
We should in fact be doubling down on fossil fuels, because these are the only always-reliable sources of electricity.
Should solar and other sources of electricity become cheaper and more reliable, people won’t have to be compelled to increasingly turn to them. The transition would happen naturally, in the normal course of progress.
And the notion that government will be able to fine-tune global weather if only we are forcibly deprived of our means of coping with the ups and downs of the weather is a willful delusion.
Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly, sure. But more importantly, the government should not be destroying them — and us — in the name of the religion of Climate Change at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The companies then perform such obliging actions as removing posts and banning users.
The software serves as a self-defense system — of the social media companies. You see, if the companies fail to sufficiently prevent government-outlawed speech on their websites, they will be punished. Maybe ruinously. By the Chinese government.
So who is doing the censoring here?
Obviously, the government.
In the U.S., the intimidatory relationship between government and social media firms is not quite so advanced or nearly so clear. But as we keep learning from documents extracted by litigation and subpoenas, for years now our federal government has been telling firms to censor things, and the firms have complied.
The latest example is that Facebook, which has always said that its content-moderation policies are “independent,” obeyed White House demands to censor posts about the likelihood that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese lab, not in nature.
In a July 2021 email, Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive, asked whether anyone could “remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man-made.”
To which a VP in charge of content policy replied: “We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”
No matter how White House press secretaries or others try to dress it up, “private” censorship conducted in obedience to governmental requests is governmental censorship.
And is eerily close to the Chinese practice.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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