BeeLine is rooted in facts and data. It is the foundation from which everything I write is based.
In this blog post I am initiating a new feature in which I highlight five facts I learned during the previous month in writing BeeLine that were particularly salient, surprising, or stupefying as I reflected on the prior month's writings.
In a world in which opinions seem to be based more on feelings, emotions and prevailing narratives it might make sense to put more focus on straightforward facts, data and truths.
Consider these facts and data again that I previously wrote about and think about the larger issues to which they relate. It is only when we understand the reality of our world that we can make the proper judgments about it and the best ways to improve it.
Critical thinking is something that is obviously not done very often these days.
Five Facts From January, 2024 ...
Electric Vehicles
EV's are only driven about 62% of the miles annually that a gas-powered vehicle is. 7,175 miles for the EV compared to 11, 642 for gas-powered vehicles.
This indicates that most EV owners are not relying on that vehicle as the primary vehicle in the household. It is a second car used for commuting and around town but not considered practical for longer trips.
Until electric vehicles can significantly see their range increase and charging times decrease there will not be any widespread adoption of EV's by consumers. This is true irrespective of other issues regarding costs, the electric grid and the scarcity of rare minerals necessary for the manufacture of EV's at scale. All of these factors argue against widespread adoption of EV's anytime soon despite the relentless push to mandate their use by our current government and others.
https://beelineblogger.blogspot.com/2024/01/electric-vehicles-short-hype.html
Illegal Immigrants
Over the last several months more illegal immigrants entered the United States than the number of births that have been recorded!
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| Credit: https://twitter.com/fentasyl/status/1740779371529740380 |
Bear in mind that the number of illegals in that chart are just those that were encountered by the Border Patrol. Nobody knows how many others snuck into the country and avoided detection.
How can this be described as anything other than a foreign invasion?
Federal Debt
Borrowings have become the largest single revenue source of the federal government over the last six months. Larger than individual income taxes, social insurance taxes or corporate income taxes.
I knew it was bad but I did not know it was quite this bad.
Here is a summary of where the revenues came from in the federal government's fourth quarter (July 1, 2023-September 30, 2023).
This was in a tweet from Stephen Moore citing numbers puts together by @EuroConOfficial.
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| Credit: https://twitter.com/StephenMoore/status/1745923645073924326 |
Urban Elites vs. Everyday Americans
It was shocking for me to see the authoritarian views held by urban elites (defined as those having a graduate degree, a household with more than $150,000 of income, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 residents per square mile) as compared to everyday Americans in a recent survey.
Almost 50% of Elites think that there is too much freedom in the United States. This compares to 16% for everyday Americans. At the same time, only 21% of Elites believe that the government has too much control compared to 57% of everyday Americans.
The disparity is even larger among those Elites who graduated from Ivy League or other similar universities.
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| Source: Source: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Them-vs-Us_CTUP-Rasmussen-Study-FINAL.pdf |
This translates to a stupefying number of Elites who want to ban some of the basic conveniences of modern life (gas stoves, gas-powered cars, SUV's, air travel and private air conditioning) in order to combat climate change.
A majority of Elites favor all of these bans and restrictions on individual freedoms.
Left unsaid is that the Elites want to restrict the freedom of everyone else but do not expect those restrictions to apply to them. After all, they are elite and they know better than anyone else.
The fact that I found most interesting last month was that only 3.6% of marriages in the United States included both a Republican and Democrat in the household. 17% include a Republican or Democrat and an Independent. 80% of marriages are equally matched from a political perspective.
Putting two people together with different backgrounds, personalities and habits in any marriage is a challenge in itself. It seems that adding differing political views to the mix clearly proves to be irreconcilable most of the time.
These numbers indicate that differing political views must be sorted out during the dating process so that marriage does not result very often if there are political differences between the couple. Alternatively, if it does. there must be a good chance that couples with differing political views ends in divorce. That is the only way you can get the type of number that came up in that study.
To put 4% in context here, consider that 10% of all marriage today involve mixed races.
40% of all marriages today are interfaith.
It is pretty astounding to consider that political views are a better indicator that couples in a marriage are equally yoked that either race or faith!
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