Posted on 03/03/2021 4:13:03 PM PST by jfd1776
By John F Di Leo -
The following are facts. There are innumerable issues in the world of public policy which are opinions, but there are also hard facts.
Society often does itself a great disservice by conflating the two. Treating a fact as if it were mere opinion can be even worse than treating an opinion as if it were fact.
THE EARTH
The earth is not a static planet; our climates change, our weather changes, from day to day, from year to year, and from century to century, through no fault or effort of our own. Sunspots and volcanic activity have a great deal of influence on the earth’s climate. Human activity has almost none. The very idea of manmade climate change being substantial enough to be consequential or even noticeable is hogwash.
PETROLEUM
Petroleum is one of the greatest gifts that Divine Providence bestowed on this planet for our benefit. Petroleum provides us with everything from energy to clothing, from laundry detergent to eyeglasses. Almost everything we live with is based on petroleum in some way; it should be championed, not demonized.
GREEN ENERGY
Most so-called “green energy” is anything but green. While there are rare exceptions, wind power and solar power cost so much to manufacture, use, and eventually decommission, the fiction that they are cost-efficient requires both massive government subsidies and incredible self-denial about the environmental damage they do. From the birds they fry or shred, to the incredible landfill space they use when retired, to the huge acreage they require for operation, green energy can honestly be described as little more than a colossal scam.
RECYCLING
Recycling is wonderful when it makes sense, but it usually doesn’t. Newspaper biodegrades on its own; plastic and glass cost more to reclaim than making from scratch. Recycling makes sense for some places, in some times, for some products; aluminum can recycling can sometimes be a convenient source of aluminum for reprocessing. Landfill space is not the problem that many ideologues imagined it to be in the 1960s. Society needs to stop viewing recycling programs as a necessity, and instead view them on rational cost-benefit terms. The answer will differ from community to community; we need to accept this fact and leave our society’s religious devotion to it behind.
IMMIGRATION
Reasonable immigration law must be enforced. No country can afford to absorb unlimited outsiders. Counting both legal and illegal arrivals, the United States population has doubled in the past two generations because we have allowed all forms of immigration to be unchecked. This isn’t good for anyone – not for those already here OR for the new arrivals. Allowing unchecked immigration makes it impossible to assimilate the new arrivals; this long error has superimposed a caste system onto a nation that for 150 years had advanced in equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law. We must return to respect for borders.
TAX POLICY
The Laffer Curve is Right. There used to be a recognition in the public dialogue that if tax rates are too high, they punish growth and retard opportunity. The actual point on the graph – the point of no return beyond which higher tax rates produce less actual revenue by this effect – will vary from community to community, and from industry to industry. But the general fact remains. Our polity must relearn the importance of this concept, that tax rates must not only be lowered for philosophical reasons, but for practical reasons too. Our city, state and federal tax codes are holding us back, and that means, they are holding back every individual American from the economic opportunity that our Founding Fathers intended to be our birthright.
ACCEPT REALITY
Men are men, and women are women. With the tragic exception of an infinitesimally small number of people born with the biological deformity of some version of hermaphroditism, a boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl. Period. If a child (or adult) struggles with gender dysphoria or other mental challenges, they may need and deserve our care and our support, but it helps neither that patient nor society at large to enable, or worse, encourage, the delusion that a boy is a girl, or that a girl is a boy. The damage this rapidly-spreading error has done to our schools, and particularly to girl’s and women’s sports, is both incalculable and unforgivable.
THE PANDEMIC EXCEPTION
There is no “pandemic exception” for human rights. The unconstitutional, illegal lockdowns that numerous governors (and foreign governments too) have implemented in response to the spread of the virus first noticed in Wuhan, PRC in late 2019 has done irrecoverable damage to the world economy, plunging millions worldwide into starvation and poverty. Here at home, the most fundamental elements of law – that government cannot ban public assembly, cannot ban church or synagogue attendance, cannot ban interstate commerce and travel – have been violated to an outrageous degree. The elderly die alone in nursing homes after a year without visits from family. Young people become addicted to drug or drink from lack of the social interaction that all human beings need. Suicide has skyrocketed. None of this because of a sometimes-fatal virus that affects very few; all of it because of government mandates that weren’t even legal. As bad as this is for every country that went the lockdown route, it is unforgiveable in America, where our Constitution specifically bans such errors.
FREE SPEECH
The right to free speech outweighs any personal desire to avoid being offended. The cancel culture has in recent years taken a wrecking ball to literature, to broadcasting, even to entertainment. Instead of simply choosing individually to avoid a product, the modern Left has decided that what they don’t like, they must ban, to prevent anyone else from exposure to things they don’t like. Recent outrages in this witch hunt writ large have included the destruction of library books from Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain, the deplatforming of Prager University’s educational videos, even canceling the social media accounts of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and politicians. And the Left intends to use its governmental power to endorse and support such outrages when done by the private sector. This must stop; America was built on free speech.
THE VOTE FRAUD EPIDEMIC
There was vote fraud in the 2020 election. This is not in question, and the mass media and social media efforts to deny it – even to delete references to it – are both an assault on the free speech and on the simple truth. We may not be able to say for certain, until full audits are completed, which specific races went the wrong way because fraud made the difference, but of course we can honestly say there was fraud. There is always fraud in American elections. The number of non-citizens voting, the number of people with multiple residences casting ballots from each address, the number of ballots fabricated by corrupt political machines, the number of ballot boxes stuffed through abuse of the mail-in ballot program… these are all undeniable occurrences in American elections, and they have grown, year by year, for decades now. How often does this fraud make the difference? How often does this fraud provide a winning margin to the actual loser? This is unknown. But the Left’s refusal to even tolerate mention of the fact is telling indeed.
Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland based international trade professional, writer and actor. His columns have been published by Illinois Review now for twelve years.
A collection of his Illinois Review columns on vote fraud – "The Tales of Little Pavel" - is available in eBook or paperback on Amazon.
This fine, short essay is packed full of common sense...hence it must be destroyed.
I expect a 4:00 AM FBI raid on his residence for "disinformation". That seems to be the catchall for the governments "I don't like it" charge.
Stopped reading right after I saw, “The Facts...”
More White Privilege.
Amen....I mean Awoman!
Two things, one green energy, windmills actually use more energy to produce and install then they create during their lifetime. Two, recycling, plastics also biodegrade.
I saw both of these in articles on Watts up with that.
Clear, concise and irrefutable observations...from a fellow international trade professional.
Well done.
“Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky
and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this
an effect of, perhaps, of global warming, or is this just
some meteoric occasion?” - CNN’s Deborah Feyerick
If recycling made economic sense, people would be bidding for my garbage.
He succinctly sums up the enormous stupidity of the democrat’s platform.
In their world emotions generated over the net trump facts. Closing down our social world speeds that up.
I miss seeing strangers smile. Much.
“windmills actually use more energy to produce and install then they create during their lifetime.”
Do a search on the carbon footprint on a car battery for an electric car! It’s huge!!!
This is about emotional control.
Green Energy: Taking impractical and enormously expensive electrical generating technology manufactured with caustic and toxic materials which cost more CO2 pollution to make and decommission than they save during their entire lifetime.
Bookmark.
You cannot change your sex. You can only hide it or superficially mask it as something else. But the same sex chromosomes you were born with will be the same ones you have when they bury you.
Yep. He will be standing behind a fence in two weeks, yelling “Avenge me!” to his son, who is on the other side of the fence.
Yancy Tucker is the man!
I am kind of surprised that the article is published in Illinois review
Crap writing. Even though I agree with the author, he is offering opinions as “indisputable facts”.
Okay. What did he say in this article that is wrong?
I already posted it. Why do you make freepers repeat themselves? He is offering opinions as if they are “indisputable facts”.
I was wondering if anyone would argue with my thesis. Thank you.
Now, I do agree, certainly, that there is some opinion, maybe even a lot of opinion, around these areas. But what I posted here is fact, and yes, I maintain it’s the core of each of these issues.
For example, the public is taught that recycling is always good, always wonderful, and always the right thing to do. The truth is that recycling is right sometimes and wrong frequently. My point is that we need to open people’s minds to the fact that there’s room for discussion and analysis here.
And take vote fraud, the one I closed with. Some would claim that every time a Democrat wins, the race was stolen. That’s wrong. But the Dems are going the opposite way, and claiming that there is no such thing as vote fraud, when it’s painfully obvious that there’s a ton of it. Again, I’m not taking the extreme position here. I’m saying we need society to open its mind so we can have the debate.
Right down the line, my ten points are countering an opposite that the Democrats are presenting as fact. They’ve managed to poison the political world, to warp the discussion of the issues in the marketplace of ideas, by convincing people of absolute lies.
And yes, I’m saying that we need to reopen America’s mind so that these issues can be freely discussed.
Now, if i were to be doctrinaire in treating an opinion as if it were fact, I might’ve said “no tax rate should ever be above 10%.” That would indeed be opinion. But I said that America’s tax rates are generally so high as to be destructive, and we need to relearn the basic principles of economics such as the Laffer Curve, so we can have an intelligent debate about taxes, recognizing that at a certain point, they don’t even raise more revenue, they decrease it.
To look at my list of points and think they are opinions is just to demonstrate how amazingly corrupted our political discourse must be.
JFD
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