Progressive Craziness Of The Day: SEC Obsesses Over "Climate" Risk Disclosures

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Progressive Craziness Of The Day: SEC Obsesses Over "Climate" Risk Disclosures

  • This makes three posts in a row on the subject of a “progressive craziness of the day.” But then, there’s enough progressive craziness to have such a post every day; or, really, multiple. There is an endless supply.

  • As a reader of this blog, you may rarely pay much attention to what comes out of the Securities & Exchange Commission. If you should ever look, it probably all seems like a lot of inside baseball mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, if you are a senior executive or board member at a public company, or maybe a corporate lawyer at one of the big law firms, you must pay close attention to everything the SEC does. The Commission wields oodles of arbitrary and unaccountable power. When the SEC says “jump,” corporate America responds, “how high?”

  • Needless to say, the SEC is one of those government places filled with seemingly “smart” people with no practical sense or knowledge about how the world actually works. But they think that with their brilliance they can bring about perfection and utopia in the world with just a few more regulations and micromanagement of the little people.

  • Then — as has happened in the past few months — the real world intervenes, and shows what dopes these people are.

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Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Critical Race Theory In K-12 Schools And Corporations

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Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Critical Race Theory In K-12 Schools And Corporations

  • Yesterday I attended an in-person program at the Manhattan Institute with the title “Deconstructing Wokeness in K-12 and Corporate America.” There were two panels and a speech totaling close to three hours.

  • Presenters included something of a who’s who of the movement opposing the spreading cancer of Critical Race Theory in schools and corporations: Christopher Rufo and Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy (author of the new book Woke, Inc.), Paul Rossi (the guy who blew the whistle on CRT at Grace Church School, who is currently affiliated with the Educational Liberty Alliance), and Asra Nomani (Vice President of Parents Defending Education).

  • Finally, after more than a year and a half in virtual purgatory, we have resumed in-person events to discuss issues of public policy.

  • The huge difference between in-person and virtual events is that at in-person events you get to meet the people who take important roles in contesting these issues. In addition to the presenters, several other notable participants in recent events showed up at yesterday’s event, for example Andrew Gutmann (the parent who blew the whistle on CRT at the super-snooty all-girls Brearly School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) and Maud Maron (mother of four kids in New York City public schools, who spoke out against CRT and for her trouble has been ostracized at her job defending indigent criminal defendants at the Legal Aid Society).

  • But for today I’d like to highlight the work of Rufo.

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Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Transgender Orthodoxy

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  • Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake. But somehow I’m just catching on that the latest tactic of the Left in the culture wars is to indoctrinate all the kids from K-20 in the latest insane piece of orthodoxy before letting the outside world, most particularly the parents, know what is going on.

  • So, to use the example of the new racism going by the name “anti-racism” or Critical Race Theory, by the time you find Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” on the shelf at your local bookstore, your kid has already without your knowledge undergone multiple years of instruction (if white) that s/he is an “oppressor” and a “systemic racist,” or (if black) that s/he is “oppressed” and a “victim.”

  • Is the same tactic pervasive in other areas? I had had some inklings that the ideology of transgenderism may be another such area, but I must admit that I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

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New York Times Threatens Senator Manchin With Witchcraft If He Obstructs Democrat "Climate" Agenda

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New York Times Threatens Senator Manchin With Witchcraft If He Obstructs Democrat "Climate" Agenda

  • It’s always been just a little odd that the guy the Democrats most need to get on board to get their big transformational plans enacted is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, while at the same time the centerpiece of those plans is to put the most important industry of West Virginia, coal mining, completely out of business.

  • That sounds like it’s going to be a tough sell. Is there any argument that might convince this guy to get with the program?

  • In one of the funniest articles I have read anywhere recently, the New York Times thinks that it has come up with the argument that will carry the day: threaten Manchin with witchcraft!

  • The article, covering about half of the front page of yesterday’s print edition, tells Manchin that if he continues to “block” the Democrats’ plans to destroy the coal industry, a spell will be cast over his state and it will be inundated with floods.

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How To Be A Conservative Student On A University Campus Today

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How To Be A Conservative Student On A University Campus Today

  • It gets harder and harder to be an independent thinker in the midst of one of those indoctrination and groupthink factories known as a university. Step out of line, and at any moment someone can claim to be offended or “triggered” by something completely bland that you may have said. Next thing you know, someone will have tattled on you to the administration.

  • And you know exactly what the administration will do: They will simultaneously mouth platitudes about “free speech” while making every kind of threat, veiled or not, to bring you into line.

  • Is there any way for you to come out ahead? Within the last few days, a small number of students — one at Yale and two at Arizona State — have given tutorials on how to win at this game.

  • To be fair, these students got a big assist from the fact that the crazy leftists who run these places have gotten so confident of never facing any pushback that they no longer hesitate to engage in conduct that is completely indefensible.

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Useless Green Energy Hitting The Wall

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Useless Green Energy Hitting The Wall

  • In the field of litigation settlements, people sometimes talk about a “win, win” scenario — a settlement structure where both sides can get some advantage and simultaneously claim victory.

  • By that criterion, what is “green” energy (aka intermittent wind and solar power)? The public pays hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to get the things built, and in return it gets: sudden shortages and soaring prices for coal, oil, gas and electricity; and dramatically reduced reliability of the electrical grid, leading to periodic blackouts and risks of many more of same; and despite it all fossil fuel use doesn’t go down.

  • It’s a “lose, lose, lose.”

  • As the world comes out of the pandemic and the international economy returns to attempting to fulfill normal consumer demand, you can see green energy hitting the wall pretty much everywhere you look. It’s just a question of which data points you want to collect for a day’s entertainment.

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