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J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether ‘Rumors’ of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True

Posted on September 20, 2024September 20, 2024 by Lone Candle

“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”

Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””

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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.

Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”

Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.

You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/

J.D. Vance’s Revisionist History

Posted on September 19, 2024September 19, 2024 by Lone Candle

“”Six years after then-President Donald Trump signed the first tariffs and began a costly U.S.-China trade war, it’s become clear that these tariffs are an abject policy and economic failure,” wrote Jay Derr of the Reason Foundation (the organization that publishes this website) earlier this year. “These tariffs have negatively impacted trade between the U.S. and China, leading importers to shift toward Mexico’s west coast instead of shipping directly to the United States. As a result, trade between Mexico and China has grown by 60% in one year.”
They also, on net, failed to protect American jobs: The U.S.-China Business Council found in 2021, that some 245,000 American jobs were lost as a result of the tariffs. And despite the Trump team’s hopes, U.S. Steel may in fact get sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation after all (though pulling the deal off is proving complicated).

“The entire purpose of a tariff is to shift consumer behavior away from politically disfavored goods—such as imports from China—toward domestic-made items that would otherwise lose out in a free market of price competition,” wrote Reason’s Eric Boehm last month. If reimposed and broadened, “Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff would be equivalent to a $300 billion tax increase,” reports Boehm. “Assuming other countries would also raise trade barriers in retaliation, the final toll would be more than 825,000 jobs lost, according to Tax Foundation Senior Economist Erica York.” For the typical American household, Trump’s round two would impose costs of an additional $1,500 annually.”

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“If we get more tariffs, it’s American consumers who will have to bear the consequences—after suffering through several years of high inflation that have already taken a big chunk out of their budgets.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/26/j-d-vances-revisionist-history/

Plastics Are Better for the Climate Than Aluminum and Glass, Actually

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Producing plastics from fossil fuels emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which contributes to warming the planet. An April study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that in 2019 “global production of primary plastics generated about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent,” which represents 5.3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So switching to plastic alternatives would help slow man-made global warming, right?
Not so fast, says a new study in Environmental Science & Technology, which finds that “replacing plastics with alternatives is worse for greenhouse gas emissions in most cases.” The European researchers report that in “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.”

The researchers considered emissions from production, transportation, use, and end-of-life disposal, including landfilling, incineration, recycling, and reuse. Calculating the product life cycles, plastic products release 10 percent to 90 percent fewer emissions than do plausible alternatives—often because it takes less energy to make and transport them.

Take the perennial plastic vs. paper conundrum about grocery bags. In the U.S., more than 500 cities and 12 states have banned plastic grocery bags. However, the researchers find that plastic grocery bags emit 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases than paper bags. Producing paper bags emits three times the greenhouse gases of plastic ones, and transportation emissions are higher because paper bags weigh six times more than plastic bags. Additionally, paper bags emit globe-warming methane as they rot in landfills.

Alternatives to plastic bottles are aluminum cans and glass bottles. Even though aluminum cans are often recycled, the researchers find that over their life cycle, they emit twice as many greenhouse gases as plastic bottles. Glass bottles emit three times more.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/27/plastics-are-better-for-the-climate/