California will ban “small off-road engines” (SORE) primarily used in gas-powered lawn equipment, such as leaf blowers and lawnmowers, in a law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom this weekend.
The bill, AB 1346, directs California’s Air Resources Board to draw up regulations that will go into place by 2024. It bans the sale of new SOREs, but does not seem to ban their operation.
The law will apply not only to gas-powered lawn equipment, but also to generators and emergency response equipment and other assorted categories. The bill does give regulators some leeway with the regulations based on what is found to be “technologically feasible,” so some portions of the regulation may be pushed back beyond 2024.
California’s reasoning for the ban is because gas-powered lawn equipment produces surprisingly high levels of pollution, but these devices have not been subject to nearly as much regulation as vehicle engines allowing them to pollute with impunity. The small engines in this equipment don’t fully combust the gasoline used to run them, which means they emit high levels of particulate exhaust. This exhaust forms smog, which contributes to poor air quality and harms health.
In fact, they’re so dirty that according to California regulators, SOREs in California contribute more total nitrous oxide (NOx) and reactive organic gases (ROG) pollution than passenger cars do statewide. Operating a gas leaf blower for one hour can produce as many NOx+ROG emissions as driving 1,100 miles in a new passenger car.
Passenger cars still produce more global warming emissions than SOREs do, but the health effects of these small engines are much heavier than you’d think. And they’re annoyingly noisy, too (and noise pollution also kills).
The bill underlines that there are perfectly good zero-emission replacements for these engines, and these are available at low cost. Some regulators already have rebate programs to reduce the cost of shifting to electric lawn mowers, for both residential and commercial users. These programs have been in place for a long time because lawn equipment is comparatively cheap and very polluting, so regulators can get a lot of bang for their buck by incentivizing retirement of SOREs. AB 1346 directs state agencies to increase funding to these programs to support the transition to zero-emission equipment.
If you’re in California (or anywhere else that has air), check out Electrek’s “Green Deals” section where we periodically post green tech deals. You’ll find deals on electric lawn equipment quite often, so save yourself a few bucks while helping to save the lungs and ears of your neighborhood, too. And check with your state clean air regulator to see if any rebates are available – here’s California’s page, with links to regional incentives for various parts of California.
People who’ve made the switch to electric lawn equipment also seem to love them. I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from owners. In particular, our publisher, Seth Weintraub, loves his (and he won’t stop talking about it in our Slack channel either):
The decreasing popularity of theory corresponds to the naïve belief that science, as Lord Kelvin famously put it, is all about measurement and that the data somehow “speak for themselves“—when in reality, empirical data are useful only in the way they are interpreted by thinking, choosing, acting human beings.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley’s David Card, MIT’s Josh Angrist, and Stanford’s Guido Imbens for their work on “natural experiments,” a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another. Card, of course, became famous in and outside the profession for his 1994 paper with the late Alan Krueger on the minimum wage. Card and Krueger eschewed the conventional supply-and-demand analysis of the minimum wage (which predicts that, other things equal, increasing the minimum wage leads to increased unemployment) in favor of an atheoretical, empirical exercise. They compared the change in fast-food restaurant employment in New Jersey, which increased its state minimum wage, to that in neighboring Pennsylvania, which didn’t, and found no substantial differences, concluding that—contrary to the conventional wisdom among economists—minimum wages do not price low-productivity workers out of the labor market.
While the details of the Card-Krueger study are widely disputed (to put it politely), the empirical approach they championed is not. Their work helped usher in what has been called the “credibility revolution” or “identification revolution” in applied microeconomics (also called the “design-based approach” as opposed to the older, “model-based approach”). Angrist and Imbens developed econometric techniques for estimating the “treatment effects” that are central to this approach. Unlike laboratory experiments, in which subjects can be assigned randomly to treatment and control groups, with the experimenter holding all other conditions constant, observational studies require statistical tricks to satisfy the “ceteris paribus” conditions. Developing and applying these tricks has been the main focus of mainstream applied economics over the last three decades.
Despite its popularity, this approach is not without its critics. To Austrians, causality in social science is a theoretical construct, not something that can be teased out of the data without some a priori understanding of human behavior and how it affects (and is affected by) economic and social phenomena. Experimental and quasi-experimental methods may provide some limited historical-empirical insight but tend to lack “external validity,” i.e., one never knows if the results will hold up in other settings. There are plenty of mainstream critics of the overuse of natural experiments, field experiments (randomized controlled trials), and the overemphasis on identification over importance (George Akerlof calls this a bias toward “hardness”).
More generally, the newer approaches herald a declining interest in theory in favor of what might be called crude empiricism—”crude” not in the sense that the empirical methods are unsophisticated, but meaning that the underlying questions are simple, “does this x affect this y” questions that rarely involve economic ideas, constructs, or relationships at all. I have previously written about the move away from economic questions and toward issues that are “small” in the sense that they don’t involve economic principles at all. The decreasing popularity of theory corresponds to the naïve belief that science, as Lord Kelvin famously put it, is all about measurement and that the data somehow “speak for themselves“—when in reality, empirical data are useful only in the way they are interpreted by thinking, choosing, acting human beings. Author:
Peter G. Klein is Carl Menger Research Fellow of the Mises Institute and W. W. Caruth Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.
The US is considering a “full range of tools” to use in response to reports of Ethiopia’s government launching an offensive against forces from the northern Tigray region, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday.
“We are considering the full range of tools at our disposal to address the worsening crisis in northern Ethiopia, including potentially the use of targeted economic sanctions,” Price told reporters.
The Biden administration has already issued sanctions against Ethiopian and Eritrean officials over the fighting, sparking protests in Ethiopia against Western intervention. In September, President Biden signed an executive order authorizing potential sanctions against Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party of Tigray.
This week, the TPLF said the Ethiopian army launched an offensive against them in the Amhara region. A spokeswoman for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said the offensive is meant to push the TPLF out of Amhara, an area the group entered over the past year of fighting.
The conflict that started in November 2020 has been a brutal war, with both sides accused of massacring civilians. So far, the war has killed thousands and displaced at least two million people.
Nobel prize winner for discovering the HIV virus – Dr. Luc Montagnier, recently submitted a sworn affidavit to the International Criminal Court, concluding:
This [Covid-19] vaccine is the biggest risk to humanity and the biggest risk to genocide in the history of humanity.
Governments of the world, Big Pharma and Big Media are clearly guilty.
By now – October 2021 – it’s more than evident that the Big Pharma-Great Reset globalist elite are currently committing human genocide, carrying out their eugenics depopulation agenda. In spite of Big Media’s censorship blackout as complicit murderers causing misinformed, lied to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims to die from the killer vaccines already, in response scores of leading medical doctors, expert scientists and insider whistleblowers at great risk to themselves have been shouting from rooftops to sound the apocalyptic alarm.
Early on during the vaccine rollout, last February 2021 Dr. Sherry Tenpennyaccurately predicted that by May through August, thousands of deaths from the vaccines will be falsely blamed on the fake variants. Outspoken Dr. Carrie Medej is now speaking out against the vaccine dangers through nanotechnology and the transhumanist elements of how AI through nanoparticles in vaccines are merging with genetically modified GMO former humans.
Veteran medical vaccine whistleblower Dr. Joseph Mercolaexposes the “medical reset” within Klaus Schwab’s NWO reset. Top international cardiologist, internist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough has been making big waves, in late August 2021 asserting that the vaccinated carry 251 times the viral load than the nonvaccinated. Dr. McCullough also promotes natural immunity and benign drugs HCQ and Ivermectin instead of the harmful vaccines, just declaring:
We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe.
Even the mRNA and DNA vaccine technology inventor, Dr. Robert Malone, MD rails against the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines as bioethically irresponsible and highly dangerous:
We need to confront the data [and] not try to cover stuff up or hide risks.
Canadian Dr. Charles Hoffewas horrified to learn that 62% of his mostly First Nations patients experienced permanent blood clot damage after receiving their vaccine.
This week the treating physician of national presidents, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko stated in an interview:
If we follow the advice of some of the ‘global leaders,’ like Bill Gates said last year, ‘7 billion people need to be vaccinated,’ then the death rate will be over 2 billion people. So wake up! This is World War III.
The cited medical doctors above are but a handful of countless heroic physicians who’ve gone public raising their concerns and outrage.
Renowned PhD scientists including virologists, immunologists and biochemists have also led the way, calling out the Covid-19 plandemic based on the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2010 Lockstep blueprint. Another Nobel prize winner for inventing the nefariously misused PCR test, Dr. Kary Mullis died on the eve of the fake pandemic Wuhan outbreak after repeatedly exposing Dr. Frankenstein Fauci.
Patent and intellectual rights expertDr. David Martin deconstructs the criminal etiology of the Covid-19 pandemic while ex-Pfizer VP chief scientist Dr. Michael Yeadon has repeatedly delivered his dire warnings:
The gene-based design makes your body manufacture virus spike protein, and we know, and we’ve known for years, that virus spike protein triggers blood clots. That’s a fundamental problem.
Listen to Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, talking about the pandemic and the COVID vaccine. Watch the video below.
Republicans are sounding the alarm over a proposal tucked inside the Democrats’ 2,500-page $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act that would expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and allow the agency to have access to any bank transaction of $600 or more.
The proposal would give the IRS further access to anyone’s financial information, which Republicans say amounts to federal overreach and a “surveillance state.”
“How can you possibly justify to the American people that the IRS should be snooping around in their bank, retirement, or investment accounts,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said on Oct. 7 from the Senate floor.“There’s only one explanation, and it’s simply terrifying: The Democrats want to control how you spend your money.”
“I want to be very clear what President [Joe] Biden’s proposing here is as close to policy from communist China that we’ve seen in the United States,” Scott added.
“In oppressive regimes like Cuba and communist China we’ve come to expect the surveillance state, where the government has access to every part of a person’s life. Now Joe Biden wants to bring that to America.”
Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) during a Sept. 30 House oversight hearing questioned U.S. Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen about the new policy of increasing the number of IRS agents and the IRS’s ability to monitor low-level transactions.
“We have proposed both augmenting the resources of the IRS so that it can hire qualified auditors and augmenting the information flow so that the IRS gets insight opaque sources of income, and both together we believe can serve to greatly address the $7 trillion estimated tax gap that we’ll see in this country,” said Yellen.
When pressed by Kustoff about the $600 dollar disclosure policy, Yellen defended the new plan.
“I don’t believe it’s an invasion of privacy and look, the IRS gets a great deal of information that it needs in order to make sure the taxpayers comply with the tax code,” Yellen said.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has praised the $80 billion investment in the IRS and the agency’s ability to access small bank transactions, saying Democrats want to ensure tax fairness and to make sure the wealthy do not dodge their tax obligation under the new tax plan.Sen. Mitch McConnell said he opposes the new tax plan in the Democrats’ budget of $80 billion of funding for the IRS.
“They want to finance their spending spree by effectively treating every ordinary American as if they were under IRS audit,”said McConnell.“I must have forgotten when the president campaigned on giving everybody their own audit!”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) urged the Senate to pass his legislation, the Protecting Financial Privacy Act (S.2953), which would prevent the IRS from accessing financial transaction data of their customers, building on a pre-existing law, the Bank Secrecy Act.“The bulk data collection they are proposing will do nothing to close the so-called tax gap,” said Tuberville in a press statement released Oct. 7. “All it does is violate the liberty of every freedom-loving American who values their financial privacy.”
Despite some states tentatively beginning to lift lockdown restrictions, Australian authorities are building quarantine camps that won’t be completed until next year in order to prepare for “ongoing operations” and to house those “who have not had access to vaccination.”
According to ABC Australia, one such 1,000-bed quarantine facility at Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba will be fully completed by the end of March 2022.
“At this stage, the cabins will be used by domestic travellers returning from COVID hotspots,” states the report.
However, it also makes clear that the camp will be used for “ongoing operations” and will be a source of employment for the local area.The camps is split into different zones and accommodates singles, doubles, and family rooms while being patrolled by police and security guards 24/7.
— Parents are Immediate Family (@ParentsFamily) October 8, 2021
Citing new strains of COVID and people “who have not had access to vaccination,” Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles told the media outlet, “We anticipate there to be a continuing need for quarantine facilities.”The government is leasing the land on which the camp is being built from the Wagner Corporation for 12 months with an option for a further 12 months after that.Another 1,000-bed quarantine facility is also being built on a 30-hectare Army barracks site in the industrial area of Pinkenba, near Brisbane Airport.“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear,” writes Dave Blount. “It is possibly the most repressive country in the world regarding Covid tyranny.”As we previously highlighted, state authorities in America are also constructing new “quarantine facilities” for Americans who are “unable to quarantine at home.”As we reported last year, Authorities in Quebec City, Canada announced they will isolate “uncooperative” citizens in a coronavirus facility, the location of which remains a secret. New Zealand also announced plans to place COVID infectees and their family members in “quarantine facilities.”Back in January, German authorities also announced they would hold COVID dissidents who repeatedly fail to properly follow the rules in what was described as a ‘detention camp’ located in Dresden.* * *
But the NDAA also often contains domestic innovations like this year’s inclusion of provisions “grant[ing] military courts the authority to strip servicemembers of their Second Amendment rights without due process and without the servicemember being present in court to defend themselves.”
After all, if women want to go help bomb children in Afghanistan—and join the Pentagon in losing wars across the globe—they are free to volunteer.
You can count on war party water carriers like Kelly, Toomey and Casey to jump on the NDAA bandwagon.
As in many previous years, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is chock-full of terrible legislation slyly inserted for the purposes of concealing matters from the public. Both parties have been long guilty of this, with both groups using the NDAA to pass police state legislation increasing federal spying and law enforcement powers.
All of the NDAA should be considered controversial, since so much of it is devoted to perpetuating the US’s aggressive, wasteful, and counterproductive efforts at global hegemony. But the NDAA also often contains domestic innovations like this year’s inclusion of provisions “grant[ing] military courts the authority to strip servicemembers of their Second Amendment rights without due process and without the servicemember being present in court to defend themselves.”
In other words, the legislation expands what is de facto conscription, since it sets up the US government to enact an active draft with ease and to track down all the young people who are to be forced into military service should the federal government decide to do so.
Any opposition to expansion of the draft is welcome. Yet the reasons for the opposition—mostly coming from conservatives—amount to little more than weak-tea arguments wrapped up in the usual promilitary pablum we’ve come to expect from the Right. These arguments ultimately boil down to saying, “Yes, it’s perfectly fine to enslave young men for a period of years in service of the state. Just don’t do it with women.”
With “opponents” granting such draconian state acts this level of deference and legitimacy, it’s no surprise the regime turns around and decides “the draft is for everybody” after all.
Of course expanding the draft to woman should be opposed, but meaningful opposition must come in the form of opposition to conscription overall. After all, the worst part of conscription is the fact the real-world effect of any draft is a massive expansion in government power over the lives of the population.
Conscription as a 100 Percent Tax
“Conscription is slavery,” Murray Rothbard wrote in 1973, and while temporary conscription is obviously much less bad—assuming one outlives the term of conscription—than many other forms of slavery, conscription is nevertheless a nearly 100 percent tax on the production of one’s mind and body. If one attempts to escape his confinement in his open-air military jail, he faces imprisonment or even execution in many cases.
States have long implicitly recognized the fundamental nature of conscription as a form of taxation. In Switzerland, for example, young men who are found unfit for military service are assessed an additional tax for a period of years in lieu of military service. In other places, such as the United States, where state and local conscription existed prior to the Civil War, those with means were able to avoid military service by paying an additional tax of various sorts or paying for “substitutes.”
Conscription remains popular among states because it is an easy way to directly extract resources from the population. Just as regular taxes partially extract the savings, productivity, and labor of the general population, conscription extracts virtually all of the labor and effort of the conscripts.
Conscription as a Weapon in the Culture War
If the debate over this issue continues, we’re likely to hear a lot about how “fairness” and egalitarianism require an expansion of the Selective Service System. It’s part of the Pentagon’s much-touted mission in expanding roles for “transgendered” people and other groups who have presumably been unjustly denied the opportunity to participate in the latest “regime change” scheme.
But those claims are all distractions from the central issue here, which is the state’s power over the citizen.
After all, if women want to go help bomb children in Afghanistan—and join the Pentagon in losing wars across the globe—they are free to volunteer. Whether or not women can be directly involved in military acts, however, is a completely separate issue from conscription and the Selective Service. There is a difference between opening up military jobs to women and forcing women into military service.
Besides, if fairness is a concern, there’s an easy way to achieve fairness on this issue: abolish the Selective Service for everybody. It’s as easy as that. It wouldn’t even cost a dime of taxpayer money. Simply shred the records, fire everyone who works for Selective Service, and lease out the office space to organizations that do something useful. Then, we won’t have to hear anything about “discrimination” or the alleged sexism implicit in a policy that outrageously neglects to force women to work for the government against their will.
But Isn’t This Just a Symbolic Gesture?
Some who want to expand Selective Service for egalitarian reasons are claiming that it’s all just symbolic anyway, because the draft “will never happen.”
It’s a mistake to think that the draft could never return because people supposedly would overwhelmingly oppose people being forced into combat. Even if that is the case, there is no reason at all why conscription could not be used to draft people for noncombat positions. After all, only a very small portion of the military ever sees combat. The vast majority of soldiers are involved in logistics, transportation, and desk jobs such as computer programming.
Only a small portion of military deaths occur in combat. Most deaths in the military are due to accidents.
Additionally, there is no reason that Selective Service could not be modified to be used to draft people for so-called national service positions in which conscripts would perform noncombat bureaucratic and manual labor jobs. Austria and Switzerland (which have conscription) allow this option for those morally opposed to combat. And historically—such as during World War II—“service” was imposed on conscientious objectors, who were forced to work on farms or perform other types of manual labor in special camps.
So no, the draft is not “hypothetical,” “symbolic,” or something that “will never happen.”
Numerous countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia still employ conscription, and it is hardly some kind of never-used relic from the distant past.
Military service is one thing, the editors at National Reviewonce wrote, but forcing women into it is “barbarism,” they admit. They’re half right. It is indeed barbarism to force women to fight wars for the state. But the same is also true of conscription for men.
by Tyler Durden
