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Do You Want a Peaceful and Prosperous Society or Not?

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Every Sunday at my church, we are exhorted to pray, among other things, for peace in the world and for the men and women who serve our nation — i.e., the military and the CIA . Naturally, the priests who craft the prayer, along with most of the congregation, fail to see the irony of those two prayers. That is, they fail to see that it is the Pentagon and the CIA whose activities around the world, especially in the Middle East and Afghanistan, are a major reason that Americans live without peace and prosperity. Suppose some federal agency was conducting tours in which they regularly guided people to walk through a bed of rattlesnakes. Every day, some people are bit by rattlesnakes and die. Imagine American churches, seeing this ongoing death toll, exhorted their parishioners every Sunday (1) to pray that people stop being bitten by rattlesnakes; and (2) to also pray for the bureaucrats who are guiding people ...

Republicans and CAFE Standards

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The auto industry won’t be meeting the U.S. government’s 54.5-mile-per-gallon (mpg) fleet average fuel economy target in 2025. But neither will it have to. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) last month released for public comment a draft Technical Assessment Report (TAR) for light-duty vehicle Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and Green House Gas (GHG) standards for vehicle model years 2022–2025. The report takes the 54.5 mpg goal off the table. It turns out that low gas prices have increased consumer demand for SUVs, crossovers, and light trucks — all of which get lower gas mileage than cars. Car-manufacturer fleet fuel-economy averages are sales-weighted. The original 2025 standard assumed that cars would make up two-thirds of the new vehicles sold that year and that SUVs, crossovers, and light trucks would make up one-third. The government now estimates the overall fleet average fuel economy will be between ...

U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Turkey? Didn’t JFK Order Their Removal?

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Nothing the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — does surprises me anymore, but I must admit that I was bit taken aback when I read an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times entitled, “Let’s Get Our Nuclear Weapons Out of Turkey” by Steve Andreasen. The article pointed how the political instability that is roiling Turkey places the U.S. nuclear missiles in that country in danger of falling into the wrong hands. U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey? That’s not possible, I thought. President Kennedy ordered the removal of U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey more than 50 years, as part of the deal he struck with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did U.S. nuclear weapons get back into Turkey? More important, what are they doing there? What is their purpose? At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy himself was surprised to discover that ...