Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   1/30/2024                        Crazy-fornia, pro-spending, anti-freedom

Updates on EVs and COVID vaccines below. An ongoing theme in this space can be summarized by Joel Kotkin’s insightful “California: where freedom goes to die—Gavin Newsom has turned the Golden State into a woke dystopia. California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity.”

Between mandated “gender-neutral” toy sections; wanting billions from people having no connection to slavery, for distribution to folks unconnected to the suffering of slavery; legislated medical speech controls; indoctrinating the young over a non-existent “climate crisis”; and the thinly-veiled tolerance of lawless, drug-injecting, public space befouling homelessness—there is nothing for any other non-Democrat-ruled state to emulate. It’s opposite to the “model for the nation” that Newsom proudly proclaims.

Our (7 cents per kilowatt/hour) bill in Oregon for a modest electric home with a gas water heater that provides floor heating, is less than $50. Our vacant home in Red Bluff, with nothing but two refrigerators running in the winter, costs, at 35 to (now) 42 cents per kwh, close to $200 a month. That’s a whole lot of economic freedom lost to the government-mandated “green energy” nonsense that drives PG&E’s rates.

The “bullet train” budgetary fiasco; the open invitation of “California for all” for illegal immigrants getting Medi-Cal; the (Democrat-caused) crime and inflation that has driven the San Francisco toy store that inspired the “Toy Story” movie out of business;

“Now California Dictators Want to Control How Fast Your Car Can Go,” by Victoria Taft, refers to SB 961. It would “require certain vehicles, commencing with the 2027 model year, to be equipped with an intelligent speed limiter that would limit the speed of the vehicle to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.”

More on the Electric Vehicle market adjustment, a spreading boondoggle: “Evidence EVs are a fading fad is ‘rolling in fast’ as Tesla, GM and Ford slash prices” (marketwatch.com). “EV doubters like Toyota bet on hybrids, and now look prescient.” It cites the “bread maker machine” fad (we have one and still like the fresh-baked bread surface holding a week’s worth of butter), which faded in favor of just buying bread off the shelf.

It’s asked “Are plug-in vehicles the bread maker of our day?” In spite of government-subsidized technology and Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial talents, “it appears that consumers still prefer to drive to a gas station for a five-minute fill-up than to retrofit their garage and suffer the range anxiety that comes from hunting for a charging station in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall.”

At Governing.com, an article laments (last May): “Why Do So Many EV Chargers Across the Nation Not Work?—Two years ago, 14.5 percent of EV drivers said they were unable to charge at a public station. Now it’s 21.4 percent. For the nation to meet its climate goals, a reliable EV charging station network is vital.” I get the irony of anyone thinking that the planet’s climate will be even infinitesimally affected by even a complete conversion of America’s entire rolling stock of gas and diesel vehicles to battery-run power. Get real. Gas works.

More cautionary articles on COVID and the vaccines—which can protect some people while being completely unnecessary for others. “The CDC Knew About the COVID Vaccine and Risk of Myocarditis, but Forgot to Send the Memo” (By Jennifer O'Connell).

“The Epoch Times exclusively obtained an alert from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was supposed to be issued to state and local officials, showing that the connection between the COVID mRNA vaccines and myocarditis was indeed valid. The alert was dated May 21, 2021, months after VAERS reported its first finding of a link between the vaccines and heart inflammation in December of 2020.”

“COVID Vaccines Could Trigger Vasculitis, Damaging Multiple Organs,” (theepochtimes.com). “Several case reports indicate the COVID vaccines may be associated with vasculitis, a condition that inflames and damages blood vessels.” Also, “Repeated mRNA Vaccination May Hamper Recovery From COVID-19: Study—There is also a risk of autoimmune disorders and inflammatory diseases following repeated COVID shots.”

“Epidemic Forecasting Models Overestimated Potential Infection Numbers Amid COVID-19 Lockdown Debate,” (Naveen Athrappully). “The Imperial College London’s model predicted 40 million deaths in the first year of COVID-19 while the real count is 6.9 million deaths altogether.

“A new study has shown that flawed epidemic modeling techniques can lead to overestimating the number of people who could get infected during a pandemic—resulting in unnecessary measures such as lockdowns and mass vaccination campaigns.” Referenced is a peer-reviewed study, published in the Journal of Physics Complexity on January 9. We need to insist that genuine scientific research and data be returned to the public realm without thinly-veiled agendas in service to top-down, government power-centric, control policies.

To wit: “'Disease X': the New and Improved COVID Meant to Scare the Liberty Out of You,” by Kevin Downey, Jr. (pjmedia.com) Don’t think the architects of the pandemic response are chastened over their mistakes; they would do it all over again, complete with lockdowns, school closures, liberty-destroying mandates on businesses, churches, bodily autonomy, etc. Despots gotta be despotic; tyrants gotta be tyrannical.