Quick Takes – Jobs for Big Tech; Favors for Big Oil; Nothing for You

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Silly peasant, luxuries are for the rich people!

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     When you are a pro-Obama and working for a pro-Obama company, certain opportunities in the public sector seem to just open up…

“More than 250 people have moved from Google and related firms to the federal government or vice versa since President Barack Obama took office.

“The Google Transparency Project, the work of Campaign for Accountability, poured over reams of data to find 258 instances of ‘revolving door activity’ between Google or its associated companies and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress since 2009.

“Much of that revolving door activity took place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where 22 former White House officials went to work for Google and 31 executives from Google and related firms went to work at the White House or were appointed to federal advisory boards by Obama. Those boards include the President’s Council on Science and Technology and the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.”

     Of course, getting around environmental regulations in California is easy… when you got more than one Democrat governor watching your back…

“The report says that in November 2011, former governor Gray Davis — by then a lawyer for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. — pressured Brown to fire two oil and gas regulators the company felt were slow to grant injection well permits for hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Two months later, Oxy contributed $250,000 to Brown’s Proposition 30 tax increase initiative, and shortly after that gave $100,000 to a pet Brown charity, the Oakland Military Institute. This surely looks like old-fashioned pay-to-play, and boosting ‘fracking’ as well. Maybe he’s allowing fracking because the money is just too good.

“The report shows that in June 2013, tough regulations were dropped from Senate Bill 4, a bill intended to restrict ‘fracking’. The same day, Chevron Corporation gave $135,000 to the Democratic Party. Several months later, Chevron wrote the party a $350,000 check and a week later, the party put $300,000 into Brown’s re-election campaign fund. On the same day, Chevron plunked $54,400 (the legal maximum) into Brown’s election coffer.”

     And if you are just some peasant living in Las Vegas, Phoenix, or some other place where you literally need air conditioning to live?

Suck it up, peasant!

“Karen Heller’s screed was but the latest entry in a genre that has become as much a summer staple as comic-book movies — the cri de compresseur. From William Saletan’s 2006 critique of “the deluded world of air conditioning” to Kate Murphy’s 2015 lament of the ‘deep freeze’ offices experience every summer, the genre shares a belief that air conditioning is wasteful, indulgent, misguided, and even immoral.

“In 2012, two participants in a New York Times forum prompted by a Times report that AC use was exploding in the Third World answered the question ‘Should air-conditioning go global, or be rationed away?’ in terms that could have been borrowed from an 18th-century anti-luxury tract. Stan Cox advocated limiting air conditioning (‘a luxury we can’t afford’) on the grounds that we must distinguish ‘between absolute necessities like food or water and manufactured necessities like a houseful of refrigerated air. And making such decisions could help us recover some of the resilience our own culture has lost in the age of air-conditioning.’ Rajendra Shende, former head of the U.N.’s ozone program, said air conditioning, iPads, fatty foods, and cars are not ‘rights’ but ‘are luxuries, and they often make us soft.’ Literally soft, perhaps, as some investigators have found a link between air conditioning and obesity. Luxury makes society soft. Air conditioning is a luxury. QED. Mandeville must have been spinning in his grave.”

     Keep chillin’ there elitist schmucks, keep chillin’…

     TTFN.

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