Month: February 2024

By Catherine Yang of Epoch Times

Ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on whether former President Donald Trump can be disqualified as a candidate by individual states under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, an Illinois judge ruled President Trump ineligible for the ballot.

Cook County Circuit Court Judge Tracie Porter, following other jurisdictions, stayed her order to remove the former president pending an appeal which he has, and which the Supreme Court has said it will hear. The ruling came a week after the judge heard arguments regarding Illinois statutes.

“This Order is stayed until March 1, 2024 in anticipation of an appeal to the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, or the Illinois Supreme Court. This Order is further stayed if the United States Supreme Court in Anderson v. Griswold enters a decision inconsistent with this Order,” the ruling reads.

On Feb. 8, the day the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding Colorado’s disqualification of President Trump, mail-in ballots were sent out in Illinois with President Trump’s name on them. This puts the state in a position to potentially have to not count votes cast for him.

If the order is not stayed and reversed, the state elections board will be tasked with removing “Donald J. Trump from the ballot for the General Primary Election on March 19, 2024, or cause any votes cast for him to be suppressed, according to the procedures within their administrative authority.”

Much of the judge’s opinion and order dealt with state law and whether the state elections board had the jurisdiction to rule on this matter.

The judge found that Illinois law allowed petitioners to bring this kind of a challenge and that President Trump was “disqualified by engaging in insurrection,” noting that this finding was echoed by the hearing officer of the state election board and the Colorado Supreme Court.

“This Court shares the Colorado Supreme Court’s sentiments that did not reach its conclusions lightly. This Court also realizes the magnitude of this decision and it (sic) impact on the upcoming primary Illinois elections,” the order reads.

Both of those jurisdictions based the “insurrection” conclusion on records that plaintiffs presented drawn largely from the controversial Jan. 6 Select Committee report.

Judge Porter determined that Section 3 was self-executing, applied to presidents, and could be applied by individual states even in the event of a national election.

These legal issues are all currently before the Supreme Court, which on Feb. 8 questioned attorneys representing President Trump and six petitioners from Colorado on the ramifications of states applying Section 3 at length and spent little time discussing whether an insurrection occurred.

Petitioners

The challenge was brought by five Illinois voters, represented by the activist group “Free Speech for People.”

Earlier, the bipartisan Illinois State Board of Elections unanimously voted to keep President Trump on the ballot after determining that the board did not have the authority to analyze constitutional issues. The board unanimously voted to keep President Joe Biden on the ballot for similar reasons, in response to two separate challenges brought against the sitting president.

The challenge to President Trump’s eligibility was then appealed in circuit court, and the parties have indicated that whatever the ruling, it would be appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Free Speech for People Legal Director Ron Fein declared it a “historic victory.”

Continue reading at Epoch Times

Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

The Supreme Court seemed divided during oral argument on Feb. 28 over whether it would uphold the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulation prohibiting ownership of bump stocks.

That regulation came after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas where a gunman used bump stock-equipped firearms. It reversed years of ATF interpretations allowing non-mechanical bump stocks, or those without a spring.

In doing so, ATF reinterpreted a post-Prohibition law that banned the use of machine guns. Unlike other gun rights cases, the attorneys in this case—Garland v. Cargill—didn’t talk much about the Second Amendment. Rather, they sought to convince the justices that the phrases “automatically” and “single function of the trigger” within federal law either did or didn’t apply to bump stocks.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote an opinion from 2022 upholding gun rights, peppered the Biden administration with questions focused on teasing out the differences in operating a firearm with or without a bump stock.

Much of the debate focused on whether bump stocks allowed a single trigger pull to initiate a process by which bullets were rapidly released.

Jonathan Mitchell, the New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney arguing for Michael Cargill, repeatedly emphasized that bump stocks only allowed one bullet per trigger pull. He also argued that firing with bump stocks didn’t meet the statutory language of “single function of the trigger” due to grammatical reasons and the fact that bump stock users had to apply pressure to maintain accelerated fire.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher and Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson suggested instead that bump stocks allowed users to initiate a process with the bump stock after a single pull of the trigger.

“Once the shooter presses forward to fire the first shot, the bump stock uses the gun’s recoil energy to create a continuous back-and-forth cycle that fires hundreds of shots per minute,” Mr. Fletcher said.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Mr. Fletcher that she was “entirely sympathetic to your argument,” stating that “this is functioning like a machinegun would.” She questioned, however, why Congress didn’t pass legislation to cover bump stocks “more clearly.”

The case arose from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled in favor of Mr. Cargill while noting that the legal rule of lenity required they rule against the government when the meaning of a statute was unclear.

NCLA President Mark Chenoweth told The Epoch Times he thought the Court would rule in favor of Mr. Cargill given its textualist composition.

“We have a majority of justices who are textualists, and they‘ll look at the text, and they’ll look at the way that the gun functions, and I think that they will decide that the bump stock is on the outside of the machinegun ban.”

The National Firearms Act

Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh raised concerns about how ATF’s 2018 regulation would apply to people who later owned bump stocks. But most of the questioning focused on how bump stocks operate, the wording of the National Firearms Act, and Congress’ intent in passing the law in 1934.

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The three liberal justices seemed skeptical of Mr. Mitchell’s arguments—particularly Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who suggested he was asserting an irrelevant distinction for the federal law involved.

Both questioned whether the overall thrust of the 1934 law was intended to prevent use of devices like bump stocks.

“As far as I can tell, the sort of common usage of the word ‘function’ is not its operational design. It’s not the mechanics of the thing. It is what it achieves, what it’s being used for,” Justice Jackson told Mr. Mitchell.

She added that “weapons with bump stocks have triggers that function in the same way. They—through a single, right, pull of the trigger or touch of the trigger, you achieve the same result of automatic fire.”

Mr. Mitchell countered that “a single discharge of the trigger produces only one shot. It doesn’t produce a round of automatic fire. The only way you get to repeated shots with a bump stock equipped rifle is for the shooter himself to continually undertake manual action by thrusting the forestock of the rifle forward with his non-shooting hand.”

Part of the confusion surrounding the statute involves ATF’s contention that “single function of the trigger” under federal law included a “single pull of the trigger.” Both Justice Neil Gorsuch and Mr. Mitchell cast doubt on that interpretation, noting that “function” was a transitive verb.

“People don’t function things,” Justice Gorsuch said. “They may pull things, they may throw things, but they don’t function things.”

Justice Kagan suggested that Mr. Mitchell’s interpretation lacked common sense.

“I view myself as a good textualist,” she said. “I think that that’s the way we should think about statutes. It’s by reading them.”

“But, you know, textualism is not inconsistent with common sense,” she added. “Like, at some point, you have to apply a little bit of common sense to the way you read a statute and understand that what this statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action.”

“Whether it’s a continuous pressure on a … conventional machinegun, holding the trigger, or a continuous pressure on one of these devices on the barrel … I can’t understand how anybody could think that those two things should be treated differently.”

Justice Alito asked Mr. Mitchell whether his case was one where “the literal language of the statute had to control even though it’s pretty hard to think that Congress actually meant that to apply in certain situations.”

Potential Congressional Action

Justice Gorsuch indicated he thought Congressional action would have been preferable to an ATF rule interpreting prior legislation. He also asked about former Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) criticizing the use of regulation to ban bump stocks.

Justice Kavanaugh noted that bump stocks didn’t exist around the time of the 1934 law’s passage. He went on to ask Mr. Fletcher: “What’s your explanation, maybe common-sense explanation or some other explanation, for why, when this does become an issue, the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, Senator Feinstein, all say no?”

Outside of the Court, Mr. Cargill told The Epoch Times he thought Congress had authority over the issue but didn’t think it should pass a law regulating bump stocks.

The Epoch Times asked both he and Mr. Mark Chenoweth whether bump stocks were protected by the Second Amendment. “I don’t know,” Mr. Cargill said.

Mr. Chenoweth similarly said he didn’t know about the Second Amendment question and would have to look at how history did or didn’t support bump stocks’ protection under the Constitution.

“We look at this as an abuse of administrative power case, not as a Second Amendment case,” he said. “If Congress had passed this law, we wouldn’t be challenging it.”

As office tower vacancies continue to rise nationwide, many of these buildings are becoming economically nonviable workspaces, raising the question of what can be done with millions of square feet of underutilized space. Simultaneously, the US housing market faces a severe shortage, leaving investors and lawmakers to ponder whether underutilized office space can be transformed into multifamily buildings. 

Goldman analyst Jan Hatzius uses a discounted cash flow model to show that the current acquisition costs of office towers are still too high for conversion to multifamily buildings, indicating that offices will likely remain underutilized in the medium term. 

Hatzius pointed out that the viable point where office tower conversions would make financial sense would be a further price decline of 50%. 

About 4% of the nation’s office buildings could be slated for conversion projects into housing, with the share expected to jump as the office vacancy rate is forecasted to reach 18% in 2033 from about 14% this year. 

Many of these nonviable towers are still overvalued and not cheap enough for conversion because of financing costs. Even with San Francisco’s office industry in a meltdown and prices having already tumbled 35% since 2019, these levels are still too high. 

Goldman’s definition of a nonviable office tower is that it must be located in a suburban area or central business district and built before 1990 but has not been renovated since 2000. Each tower must have a vacancy rate above 30%. 

Based on Goldman’s model, Hatzius’ team suggests “that converting a nonviable office that is priced at the average current level will result in a $164 loss” per square foot, adding, “This means that current office prices would need to fall by that much, to around $154 per [square foot] or by 50%, for the cost to be fully covered by the stream of discounted future revenues.”

With that in mind, a structural downshift in office demand has occurred in recent years because of the widespread adoption of hybrid work, among other factors, including an exodus of cities by companies whose employees no longer feel safe in imploding progressive-controlled metro areas.

The CRE crisis is far from over (read prior GS report on “heightened CRE risks“). And remember the dominoes began falling last month. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Indian refiners are concerned that the latest U.S. sanctions against Russia could further impact their ability to import cheap Russian crude as freight rates are set to rise and dent refining margins, industry sources in India have told Reuters.

The U.S. levied new sanctions against Russia last week, on the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in response to the death of opposition politician and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny.

Among the 500 targets of the new sanctions, the U.S. Treasury and State are targeting Russia’s tanker operator Sovcomflot and more than a dozen crude oil tankers linked to the Russian state firm.

Refiners in India are now concerned that the new sanctions would make it more difficult to have oil shipped from Russia on non-sanctioned vessels, which would raise shipping costs and eat into the refining margins, according to Reuters’ sources.

India will still buy crude from Russia but only if it is sold below the G7 price cap of $60 per barrel and is shipped on non-sanctioned vessels, an Indian government source told Reuters.

Even before the latest U.S. sanctions, Refining margins for India’s biggest state-owned refiners had dropped amid more difficult access to Russian crude and soaring freight rates due to the Red Sea disruption to shipments, analysts and traders told Bloomberg last week.

For most of 2023, Indian refiners enjoyed high refining margins and profits as they imported cheap Russian crude at $20 a barrel and more below international benchmarks.   

The decline in refining margins is due to higher costs for Indian refiners because of higher competition for Russian supply in Asia, increased freight costs, and tougher U.S. sanctions enforcement, which has limited India’s access to very low-priced crudes from Russia.

The tougher enforcement of the G7 sanctions and related payment issues have been holding up Indian purchases of some cargoes of Russian crude oil, with tankers previously headed to India turning back eastwards, tanker-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg showed early this year.

The director of the Army National Guard ordered an “aviation safety stand down” of all helicopter units until a safety review is completed following two deadly crashes involving rotary wing aircraft. 

The decision for the grounding came after two crashes of AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters, one near Salt Lake City during a training exercise on Feb. 12, killing the two pilots aboard, and the other during a Feb. 23 training exercise in Mississippi, with both pilots surviving. 

The stand-down to “review safety policies and procedures” went into effect on Monday, the National Guard said. 

 “We are a combat force with helicopters training or on mission worldwide every day,” said Lt. Gen. Jon A. Jensen, director of the Army National Guard. 

Jensen continued: “Safety is always at the top of our minds. We will stand down to ensure all of our crews are prepared as well as possible for whatever they’re asked to do.”

The causes of both crashes have not been publicly released, but the Army’s Combat Readiness Center is investigating the incidents. 

One of the deadliest training incidents in the service’s history occurred about one year ago when two Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

Usually when someone starts to talk about taxes, the eyelids grow heavy and the attention wanes, so I’ll keep this short. The Biden administration’s tax policy proposals are a disaster for U.S. competitiveness, for families, and the employers who hire them.

While the Biden administration’s tax proposals have often been vague, with details missing, a few key elements are consistent. They rely on increased tax rates on businesses and individuals, and assume that both can be further burdened without damaging the economy. This is a falsehood.

The Biden administration’s tax proposals have been unrealistic and completely disconnected from the massive growth in expenditure reflected in the administration’s various initiatives, such as the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better plan. The administration claimed that the Build Back Better program would be “fully paid for by the tax proposals,” which was clearly untrue even at first glance. Detailed analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School indicated that the tax proposals would fall short of the administration’s spending plan by nearly $500 billion.

More relevant for individuals is what Build Back Better means for personal income tax. According to analysis from the Tax Foundation, the nation’s leading independent tax policy nonprofit, under the Build Back Better framework, the “average top tax rate on personal income would reach 57.4 percent, giving the U.S. the highest rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). All 50 states plus the District of Columbia would have top tax rates on personal income exceeding 50 percent.” Under the administration’s plan, the top statutory income tax rate on personal income would be higher than Japan, France, Denmark, Sweden, and each and every one of the 36 OECD nations. State taxes would fall on top of this.

For example, a top earning tax resident of New York or California would face a marginal tax rate of 66.2 percent and 64.7 percent, respectively.

For places like Texas or Florida without state income taxes, the top rate would nonetheless be 51.4 percent.

What will happen to incentives when somewhere between half and two-thirds of income is paid over to the government to pursue policies and programs that most Americans do not support? The effect is predictable. As envisioned, the administration’s proposed tax policies would hinder U.S. competitiveness and reduce incentives to work, save, invest, and innovate.

More recent budget proposals have fared no better. For example, the Biden administration’s 2024 budget proposals would, according to analysis from the Tax Foundation, add up to “$4.8 trillion in new taxes targeted at businesses and high-income individuals.” The budget was projected to reduce long-term GDP and wages by 1.3 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively, while costing 335,000 jobs.

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 was intended to counterbalance China and strengthen the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing sector. The objective was to encourage capital investment in American companies, but requires firms that receive funding under the program share “excess profits,” without clearly defining what that means, with the federal government. This uncertainty is an arbitrary and undefined hidden tax that, rather than strengthening competition and encouraging innovation, will have the opposite effect. It will scare away private sources of funding which will not want to risk invested capital only to see the value created expropriated by the government.

A sound tax policy has been a mainstay of conservative politics in the United States for generations. Especially since the Reagan administration, the Republican Party has made moderate tax rates a core policy focus. Before the Reagan administration, the maximum federal income tax rate ranged between 60–70 percent throughout most of the postwar era, and as high as 90 percent during the FDR years. President Reagan launched a new era focused on lower taxes as a stimulant for innovation, investment, and growth. The model worked.

Until the Biden administration, the tax policies and top rates of post-Reagan presidencies of both parties maintained some reasonableness. While Democrats tended toward higher rates and the Republicans somewhat lower, neither sought to move the maximum rate much above 40 percent. And, before President Biden, neither seriously considered imposing an annual wealth tax, a coercive tool used by only a handful of nations around the world. Wealth taxes have been pursued by socialist and communist regimes which sought extreme measures to level wealth inequities in society, but they backfire through widespread manipulations including asset hiding and expatriation. The United States already has an inheritance tax, which is a one-time equivalent tax on estates payable at time of death, and a dozen or so states have similar estate taxes. These are exploitative and punitive against people who are land or asset rich, but cash poor, like many of our farming families in rural America.

There is a direct link between taxation and inequality. The current U.S. tax code benefits the wealthy, whose primary source of income is capital gains, at the expense of the working and middle classes, whose primary source of gain is ordinary income from their hard work. Fundamentally, if taxes on capital (e.g., dividends, interest, carried interest in private equity) are lower than taxes on labor, inequality will continue to rise. This will, over time, lead to increased social unrest, instability and reduced competitiveness.

When it comes to monetary and fiscal policy, Japan is doomed. Unfortunately it is also doomed demographically.

Extending what has long been the most dismal trend in Japan’s civilizational history, government data showed that the number of babies born in Japan fell for an eighth straight year to a fresh record low in 2023, underscoring the daunting task the country faces in trying to stem depopulation.

The number of births in 2023 fell 5.1% from a year earlier to 758,631, while the number of marriages slid 5.9% to 489,281, the first time in 90 years the number fell below 500,000 – the last time the number was this low the US had just dropped the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – signaling even greater declines in the population as out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan.

The drop comes more than a decade earlier than the government’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast, which estimated births would decline to below 760,000 in 2035, according to Kyodo news.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths also hit a record – only in the other direction – rising to 1,590,503, while divorces increased to 187,798, up by 4,695.

As a result, Japan’s population, including foreign residents, fell by 831,872, with deaths outnumbering births by a record 831,872, double where it was just five years ago.

Asked about the latest data, Japan’s top government spokesperson said the government will take “unprecedented steps” to cope with the declining birthrate, such as expanding childcare and promoting wage hikes for younger workers.

None of those measures have led to any perceptive improvement in Japan’s demographic bust in the past.

The fast pace of decline in the number of newborns has been attributed to late marriages and people staying single. The administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the period leading up to 2030 “the last chance” to reverse the trend; all Japan has to do is divert the millions of illegal immigrants entering the US every month through the southern border – with the expectation they will all become diligent Democratic voters – and give them a red carpet welcome.

“The declining birthrate is in a critical situation,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters. “The next six years or so until 2030, when the number of young people will rapidly decline, will be the last chance to reverse the trend.”

A fall in the number of marriages is clearly followed by a drop in births, said Kanako Amano, a senior researcher at the NLI Research Institute. In order to increase the number of marriages, the government must conduct labor reforms, such as increasing wages in rural areas and eliminating the gender gap, Amano said.

The government is planning on submitting related legislation, including a bill on boosting child allowances to combat the declining birthrate, to the current session of parliament.

The number of births has been on a downward trend after hitting a peak in 1973 at around 2.09 million babies. It fell below 1 million in 2016.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is set to release possibly in June population data excluding foreign residents. The revised figure for 2022 showed births falling to 770,747, down about 30,000 from the preliminary figure. If a similar trend continues in 2023, the number of births excluding foreign residents is likely to total around 730,000.

Mindful of the potential social and economic impact, and the strains on public finances, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the trend the “gravest crisis our country faces”, and unveiled a range of steps to support child-bearing households late last year.

Japan’s population will likely decline by about 30% to 87 million by 2070, with four out of every 10 people aged 65 or older, according to estimates by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Via The Cradle

Hamas official Ahmad Abdul Hadi stated Tuesday that a leaked proposal for a ceasefire deal in Gaza is part of a “psychological warfare” campaign being carried out by the US.

Details of the alleged proposal were leaked to Reuters on Monday, the same day US President Joe Biden said he hoped a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas could be reached by March 4 (next Monday). 

“My national security adviser tells me that they’re close. They’re close. They’re not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we’ll have a ceasefire,” Biden claimed during an appearance on a late-night US talk show.

But Abdul Hadi, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, stated that Hamas is not satisfied with the proposal and will not compromise on any of its demands, particularly “on a ceasefire and reaching an honorable, serious deal.”

Hamas is seeking a permanent end to the war and the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel is seeking the release of the 136 captives held by Hamas in Gaza and a temporary ceasefire that would allow it to resume the war after a pause.

“We are open to any ideas posed by mediators but are also keen on preserving our key demands,” Abdul Hadi told Al-Mayadeen, adding that Israel is “seeking to hold Hamas accountable for any later failures in talks, planning to use this as an excuse to pave the way for the invasion of Rafah.”

He said the leaks were not part of the Paris negotiations but a US and Israeli attempt to give the public an illusion that Hamas had approved of them. He reiterated that “everything being shared is not serious, but a ploy to maneuver and press on the Resistance.”

The proposal leaked to Reuters outlined plans for a 40-day truce during which Hamas would free around 40 captives – including female soldiers, those under 19 or over 50 years old, and the sick – in return for about 400 Palestinians held captive in Israel.

Israel would withdraw its troops from populated areas of Gaza. Displaced Gaza residents, excluding men of fighting age, would be permitted to return to their homes. Israel would be required to allow additional humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the strip are on the verge of starvation. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) also responded to the leaked Paris proposal.

“The leaks are an attempt to pressure the Palestinians and incite them against the resistance … They are pushing for a ceasefire before Ramadan in anticipation of what might happen in Al-Quds … The enemy believes that it can deceive the resistance with different methods in order to achieve a victory it has failed to achieve on the ground,” PIJ Political Bureau member Ihsan Ataya told Al-Mayadeen.

In Gaza, residents speaking to Reuters expressed mixed feelings about possible outcomes. “We don’t want a pause, we want a permanent ceasefire, we want an end to the killing,” said Mustafa Basel, a father of five from Gaza City, now displaced in Rafah.

“Unfortunately, people’s conditions are so grim that some may accept a pause, even [just] during Ramadan,” he said. “They want a permanent end to the war, but the dire conditions make them want a pause even for a month or 40 days in the hope it becomes permanent.”

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Solar energy’s appetite for vast amounts of land has prompted the Biden administration to propose designating as much as 55 million acres of public lands as potential sites for industrial-scale solar farms.

That’s an area larger than 36 states and similar in size to Idaho or Minnesota.

An updated initiative by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), called the Western Solar Plan, proposes six alternatives for solar development.

In the most aggressive of these scenarios, 55 million acres across 11 Western states would be made available for solar energy. The least aggressive alternative would designate 8 million acres for that purpose.

The BLM’s “preferred alternative” falls halfway between the two, setting aside 22 million acres for solar development.

In total, the BLM manages 162 million acres of public land designated as “multi-use.” These multiple uses include farming, ranching, hunting and fishing, hiking and camping, drilling, and mining—and more recently, wind and solar installations and transmission lines to connect them to the grid.

The BLM, a division of the Department of the Interior, states that, in order to carry out the Biden administration’s goal of generating 25 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from wind and solar on public lands by 2025—and generating 100 percent “renewable” electricity by 2035—solar panels would need to be sited on 700,000 acres of public land.

More than 3 million solar panels are required to produce 1 GW of electricity, according to the Department of Energy. One GW can power 500,000 to 750,000 homes on average, assuming a constant supply of energy generation and use.

“The Interior Department’s work … is crucial to achieving the Biden–Harris administration’s goal of a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035,” Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior, said in a Jan. 17 statement.

“And this updated solar roadmap will help us get there in more states and on more lands across the West,” she said.

“Our public lands are playing a critical role in the clean energy transition.”

The states targeted for solar development include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. This initiative is part of a wider effort to satiate the demand for land from solar companies.

The sheer scope of the BLM plan—designating tens of millions of acres for solar development when the agency says 700,000 acres would suffice to meet Biden administration goals—is a red flag for many communities.

Dylan Hoyt, the planning program manager in the Utah Public Lands policy coordinating office, calls it “bad optics.”

“When I say bad optics, I mean when you tell me that I have 17,000 acres in Utah that’s set aside for solar, and now we’re going to jump to 3.7 or 1.5 million,” he told The Epoch Times.

“That looks terrible.”

Environmental groups and advocates for wind and solar energy applauded the plan. The Wilderness Society issued a statement that “in the face of climate pressure and the injustices of our current fossil fuel-based energy system, a rapid transition to a renewable energy economy is necessary.”

The Los Angeles Times published a supportive op-ed that stated: “Biden’s Western solar plan sounds scary, but it’s better than climate change.”

The article mentions Robert Moses, New York’s mid-20th-century unelected Parks and Recreation Commissioner, who was responsible for enormous urban planning projects including parks, bridges, and highways that crisscrossed the state.

Among Mr. Moses’s more notorious mega-projects were highway systems such as the Cross Bronx Expressway that ran through urban communities and turned once-vibrant neighborhoods into slums.

‘Destroying the Environment to Save It’

Some who are on the receiving end of the BLM’s solar plan say that, despite assurances from environmental groups, they remain concerned about the scale of this government development project and the amount of land that it would consume.

“They say we have to protect the environment, but they’re OK with destroying the environment to save it,” Gabriella Hoffman, policy analyst and host of the “District of Conservation” podcast, told The Epoch Times. “It makes no sense if you’re a conservationist.”

A report by The Nature Conservancy, published in May 2023, states that reaching the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 by using wind and solar would require more than 250,000 square miles, or 160 million acres, of land, which is an area about the size of the state of Texas.

Some communities that find themselves in the path of the wind and solar industries say this is too high a price to pay for an uncertain benefit. Energy analyst Robert Bryce keeps a database of more than 600 local communities that have opposed wind and solar installations across the United States to date.

“This idea that we can save the environment by carpeting the rural landscape with oceans of solar panels and forests of wind turbines—it boggles the mind how climate activists can justify this,” he told The Epoch Times.

To subdue local resistance, some states, most recently Michigan, are writing new laws that prevent local communities from blocking wind and solar projects. However, some in the Western states say they still expect significant pushback to the BLM plan.

“It’s definitely going to impact wildlife,” Mr. Hoyt said. And not only an impact on species that live in the designated solar zones but also on those that migrate through them.

“There’s definitely going to be conflicts with ranchers, there could be conflicts with access to public lands depending on where it’s built, and there could be potential conflicts with the mining industry,” he said.

“States didn’t really have a say in the goals in the first place, which I think is disconcerting because the states represent the citizens.”

From Multi-Use to Single-Use

One of the prime target states for solar development is Nevada, both because of the amount of sunlight it receives and because of its proximity to California and Las Vegas, with their ever-expanding demands for electricity.

The federal government owns 85 percent of Nevada’s land, most of which is desert, but residents dispute the notion that it is devoid of wildlife and say they are concerned about the sheer scale of BLM’s solar plan.

“Nevada is hard-rock mining country,” Andy Rieber, a public lands consultant residing in Nevada, told The Epoch Times, “but the average footprint in Nevada for mining disturbance is less than 1,000 acres.

Read more here…

Recent and ongoing investigations by Revolver News and the Daily Wire into the Jan. 6th pipe bombs – and video released in January by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), have raised more questions than answers.

To refresh your memory – as James Howard Kunstler wrote last month;

Mr. Massie arranged to extract previously unseen video from the Capitol Police vaults showing the exceedingly strange behavior of various law-men in the minutes after one of their number reported a pipe-bomb beside a park bench, a few steps away from their parked vehicles, outside the DNC headquarters near the US Capitol building around one o’clock in the afternoon on J6/21, just around the time that a joint session of Congress would commence the entertainment of official complaints and objections to the certification of votes in the 2020 presidential election. Of course, that proceeding was disrupted by events outside and inside the US Capitol, and those many complaints and objections were never registered.

This footage shows the discovery of the pipe bomb at a bench outside the DNC headquarters.

This first clips shows that at approximately 1:05 a man in a backpack approaches a Metro PD SUV and a black Secret Service SUV informing them of the pipe bomb’s presence

Interestingly,… pic.twitter.com/LQ2I7LVayK

— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) January 18, 2024

Two cars are shown parked blocking the driveway to the basement garage: a white Washington DC Metro Police SUV and a black Secret Service cruiser — because Veep Kamala Harris happened to be in the building at the time.

A man with a backpack, later identified as a plainclothes Capitol Police officer, steps up first to the Metro car, then to the Secret Service cruiser, cueing minutes of slow milling-about by the officers in the two cars.

Eventually several cops dawdle over to the bench to inspect what turns out to be a pipe-bomb planted in plain sight on the ground there.

The video shows no effort to cordon-off the area or to stop cars or pedestrians (children) from entering the scene near the bomb.

Now, the Epoch Times reports that a Capitol Police security camera was turned away from the DNC building during the police response to said bomb.

Security video obtained by the newspaper from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) showed Camera 8021 that was recording the operations of a bomb robot suddenly panned away from the scene just before 2:21 p.m.

The change in camera view happened 10 minutes before the Capitol Police unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) fired a water cannon to disrupt the pipe bomb for the second time in 20 minutes.

After pointing up for a short time, Camera 8021 panned left to show D Street, then zoomed in various directions until settling on a nondescript parking-lot view for the rest of the day.

A third U.S. Capitol Police security camera Camera 8021—located high on the Fairchild Building—is the third Capitol Police camera discovered to have been deliberately turned away from the unfolding pipe bomb drama during crucial operations of the bomb squad.

Mr. Loudermilk, whose Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight is investigating the Jan. 6 pipe bombs, said he was concerned by the discovery.

“These revelations are extremely troubling and raise even more important questions about the DNC/RNC pipe bomb investigation,” Mr. Loudermilk told The Epoch Times. “We will continue to rigorously seek answers. The American people deserve full transparency in this critical matter.”

Two pipe bombs were discovered near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6: one in an alley between the Capitol Hill Club and the Republican National Committee building, and the other in the bushes on the southwest side of the DNC building.

Camera 8020—also located on the Fairchild Building—was filming the assemblage of the bomb squad on E Street Southeast when it, too, was directed away at 1:44 p.m. to focus on some distant railroad tracks and a highway overpass for the next 2½ hours.

The Camera 8020 switch came just as the bomb robot turned up Canal Street Southeast headed for the DNC.

Security cameras were controlled and monitored from the Capitol Police Command Center on the seventh floor of police headquarters on D Street Northeast.

An official familiar with police command operations said directing cameras away from a developing crime scene in such a manner is “very, very odd.”

‘You absolutely would be having the camera operators training the cameras and scanning to see if anything else was going on down around the DNC,” the official said. “And you’re not seeing that. You’re seeing what looks like a deliberate move of the cameras to not record anything associated with the pipe bomb.”

Capitol Police camera 4502—mounted on the nearby Capitol power plant—did capture parts of the initial aftermath of the bomb discovery and some of the bomb-robot operations.

The latest development on the DNC pipe bomb only adds to a growing list of questions about the crime scene, how the event was handled, and if the pipe bomb was really a “viable” device, as claimed by the FBI.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) disclosed in late January that the DNC pipe bomb was discovered by a plainclothes Capitol Police officer at 1:05 p.m. on Jan. 6, confirming a report first published on Jan. 17 by Blaze Media. The Epoch Times independently confirmed the report.

Camera 3173 was in a fixed position aimed at the DNC building’s garage, so the officer’s discovery of the nearby pipe bomb doesn’t show on that camera’s video. None of the other Capitol Police cameras that cover the area around the DNC were trained on the building before the bomb discovery, so there is no CCTV video evidence showing how the officer first encountered the bomb.

When the officer walked the short distance from the bomb to a driveway where Secret Service and Metropolitan Police Department sport-utility vehicles sat, the agents inside took more than two minutes to finish their lunch before emerging to investigate, Mr. Massie said.

Former FBI special agent Kyle Seraphin, who worked surveillance in the Jan. 6 pipe bombs case, said his team was told by an FBI briefing agent that the bombs weren’t real.

“Looked very bomb-like,” Mr. Seraphin said on the Jan. 25 episode of his podcast. “Those are the actual words that I remember, ‘Looked very bomb-like.’”