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The Insanity of Our Moment

Lack of action on climate change has sparked protests (Photo: Getty)
Climate extinction?

Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism.  So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it.  I’ll explain.

Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!”  There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists.  One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others.  They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.

Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming.  They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science.  One should never say “the science says”.  “Science” has no vocal cords.  It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”.  Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind.  May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop.  People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science.  Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.

Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:

* What is the nature of the warming?  Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.

* What are the actual effects of the warming?  Are they all bad?  No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive.  Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture.  The growing season starts earlier and ends later.  Plants love CO2.  Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).

* What about droughts?  They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents.  El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold.  Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain.  The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another.  One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge.  The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average.  Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.

* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate?  No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples.  If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state.  The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down.  And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave.  Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.

* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels?  No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries.  It’s manageable.  Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.

So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives?  Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle.  The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom.  For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.

Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor.  A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui.  Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season.  Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.

This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window.  What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime?  What are the costs?  The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor.  Pencil it out.  We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground.  It’s insane.

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:

1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness.  Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life.  One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work.  He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1

* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it.  Real science cannot be suppressed.

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

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Radioactive Personality

Trump Meeting With Mueller Could Be 'Radioactive,' Allies Say

The term (radioactive personality) comes from the National Review editors’ op-ed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses (see below).  Indeed, Trump is a radioactive personality.  It bodes ill for the GOP in November.

No doubt about it, it’s true, and it’s true not because Trump drives the Left – which means the root-and-branch of the Democratic Party – nuts, but because everyone, even his friends and loyal supporters, recognize his self-absorbed boorishness and then run to a banal recitation of his accomplishments.  The reprehensive demeanor is hard to avoid.  This simple fact has profound repercussions.  Going into this election’s primaries, Trump is the weakest rival to Biden in a general election, also, no doubt about it.  If the Democrats should change their standard bearer, all bets are off for even the rosiest Trump scenario of a narrow victory in November.

How radioactive is he?  His avid fans are giddy about his head-to-head slight lead (within the margin of error) in some major polls.  Remember, he’s running against a guy who every day reminds the public that he belongs in a nursing home and not the oval office.  In addition, look at the hash Biden’s party has made of the country and our national security.  Everything from Abbey Gate (the deadly Kabul fiasco), inflation, the uncontrolled border, the assault on our standard of living in eco-totalitarianism, the neo-Marxism in DEI, the boosterism for transgenderism’s teenage genital mutilation in “gender affirming care”, the orchestrated annihilation of American education, et al, doesn’t leave much for the donkey party to run on, except the looming Trump ascendancy if he is the GOP’s avatar.

The tone for the general election is set.  Biden’s speech last week in Blue Bell, Penn., made Trump the focus of evil in the world. It’s a replay of the strategy in the 2022 midterms.  Did it work then?  I don’t know, but the expected GOP banner year turned out to be The Great Disappointment.  Apparently, it’s safe to assume that enough people fell for it.  If anything, the person of Trump animates the Democrats and sends shivers down the spine of at least a sliver of Republicans.  Not good for someone who’s already a close-run thing.

Trump Falsely Claims Biden's Speech Threatened His Loyalists With Military Force
Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” speech from Sept. 2022 in the runup to the 2022 midterms

The polls tell the tale, and have been telling the same tale for quite some time.  The second-place candidate in the Republican primary contest does significantly better than Trump in a face-off with Biden in the general.  The crazy Trump indictments and other Democrat shenanigans have certainly contributed to a heavy sympathy vote among Republicans for Trump.  While they have contributed to Trump’s political ballast among GOPers, once Trump gets out of the safe confines of the Republican primary, expect Democrats to cater to the electorate’s already deep disdain for the man from Mar-a-Largo, if only they can successfully distract the voters away from Biden’s catastrophes – a big “if”.

Follow the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls and follow them from 2023 on (see below for the latest).  The trend is clear.  At best, Trump eeks out a lead in the margin of error.  The polling details vary (for instance, registered vs. likely voters) but the direction is obvious.  Biden screws up, Trump improves, slightly!  Yesterday (Jan. 10), the YouGov/The Economist poll registered a Biden and Trump tie at 43%.  Both are stinkers with negatives in the mid to high 50s.  The last time, December 2023, a general pairing of Haley or Trump versus Biden by the Wall Street Journal shows Haley smashing Biden by 17% with Trump squeaking out only a 4-point lead (see below).  For the life of me, why are Republicans determined to make their election prospects so difficult?  It makes me wonder if this is populist sadomasochism at work.

Trump Encourages Nikki Haley to Abandon Her 'Honor,' Launch 2024 ChallengeNikki Haley (l)

I’ll leave the prognosis of sadomasochism to the field of psychology, but, at the very least, one must conclude that we live in crazy times.  Trump is still radioactive, and Biden is a bumbler after having surrendered to his party’s neo-Marxism.  Oh, America, why are we so gun-ho for mediocrities, and repulsive ones at that?

RogerG

Sources:

* “Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump”, The Editors, National Review online, 1/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/republican-voters-can-and-should-rethink-nominating-trump/

* Latest FiveThirtyEight polling at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

* “Why Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does”, Steven Shepard, Politico, 12/9/2023, at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/haley-electability-trump-biden-polls-00130926

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A Break with Victor Davis Hanson

After Words with Victor Davis Hanson | C-SPAN.org

If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it.  This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children).  But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions.  This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH).  It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him.  It’s disturbing to me.

For the record, I am not new to VDH.  I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others.  I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.

How absurd?  The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader.  So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison.  If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists.  Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office.  The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.

John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”.  And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments.  Go figure.  The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.

Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background.  There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought.  His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt.  Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.

Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything.  We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency.  Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors.  It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting.  Remember Smoot-Hawley?  Look it up.

Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression timeline | Timetoast timelines

Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine?  Start by cleaning your own house.  Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores?  Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital?  The answer lies in more than labor costs.  Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.

Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone?  Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen.  Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development.  It’s all so crassly dopey.  Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch.  Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit.  All of it homegrown.

In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots.  Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit.  If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood.  And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.

Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare.  They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS.  Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse.  And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies.  The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada.  Reform is not an option.

No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world.  In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right.  No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward.  Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.

The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head.  The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”.  More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke.  It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up.  It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.

The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda?  What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy?  Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.

Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call.  Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific.  Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine.  Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions.  We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”.  At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity.  Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.

Victor Davis Hanson Podcast -- Episode 2: Rush: The Genius of, the Era of | National Review
Rush Limbaugh at National Review Institute’s fall gala, 2019. (Lila Photo)

Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it.  The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative.  Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump.  His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning.  One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump.  So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?

• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.

Et cetera.

A conservative position is manifest in every issue.  I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.

The same is true for National Review Online.  Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not.  If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”.  What?!

I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric?  Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.

For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present.  Strange for a historian of antiquity.  In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever!  Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion.  Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so.  Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal.  Trump is only the fascination of the moment.  He too will pass.  One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.

Hanson shows little awareness of it.

CARTOON: Donald Trump and the wall | Las Vegas Review-Journal

RogerG

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Adolescent Fantasies in Our Politics

Reagan vs. Trump: Two entertainer-politicians compared | Salon.com
Reagan had policy chops having spent decades reading, thinking, writing, and engaging with policy pundits to establish what he thought and why. Not so with Trump. Yet, he is the darling of strident and nuttier elements on the right.

Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face.  A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers.  Don’t bother them with the details.

Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc.  The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters.  It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life.  Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint.  No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little.  Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?

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Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head.  A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic.  For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple.  A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom.  Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump.  In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.

Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president.  To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed.  Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration.  The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA.  Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals.  See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).

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Capitalism and Freedom: REAGANOMICS, THE ECONOMICS OF SUCCESS

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan.  If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.

If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too.  Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely.  These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”.  Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire.  He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics.  He’s not a reader nor deep thinker.  He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony.  In that sense, narcissism proved useful.

Criminal justice reform in Congress: Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan try to get along - POLITICO
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, in 2018 at the time of the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term.  Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past.  They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines.  They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump.  Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands.  Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.

The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan.  Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway.  The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party.  Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.

The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.

The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court.  To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges.  Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.

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Trump’s originalist Supreme Court nominations: Amy Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch

Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother.  Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles.  Mary Barry:

“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base.  He has no principles.  None.  His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God.  I’m talking too freely, but you know.  The change of stories.  The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read].  The lying.  Holy shit….  It’s the phoniness of it all.  It’s the phoniness and this cruelty.  Donald is cruel.”

Republicans and Trump associates against Trump. Part nineteen. Even his sister?

If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.

The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government.  From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive.  The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.

The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy.  Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows.  Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands?  Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers.  And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.

It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser.  In 2018, he lost the House.  In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate.  In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.

Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming.  What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls.  Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god.  It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it.  Trump didn’t invent sensible economics.  Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.

Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018.  What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019.  First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House.  That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.

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Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures.  Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene.  Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”.  That says about it all.

And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again.  Amazing, absolutely amazing.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html

* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf

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Hooray for Chris Christie; Vivek Ramaswamy, Not So Much

Chris Christie Goes After Ivanka and Jared Kushner

* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below.  It’s a hoot.  It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.

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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate.  We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc.  Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults.  Frequently, those two overlap.

So, what is a cult?  Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries.  Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).

Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man.  Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers.  Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged.  Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.

And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom.  There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid.  Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace.  Hmmmm, where have we heard that before?  No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult.  If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy On Why Left And Right Should Fight Woke Capital - Big League Politics
Vivek Ramaswamy

No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid.  Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion).  That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually.  We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank.  So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin.  He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.

As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia.  And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way.  This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality.  Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug.  And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout.  Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength?  How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.

Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light.  I hope that he keeps it up.  He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully.  As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine

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Victor Davis Hanson, What Happened to You?

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I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast.  I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country.  But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine.  It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right.  Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress?  Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine?  It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations.  It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.

Video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene 'didn't applaud' Zelensky's speech to Congress | indy100
Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.

The behavior boggles the mind.  Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this.  Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv.  Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO.  Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well.  The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so.  Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?”  More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.

I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below).  It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland.  The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one.  Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide.  From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one.  Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable?  Once again, it boggles the mind.

Ancient Greece timeline | Timetoast timelines
Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.
Mujahideen Waiting for Soviet Army | Afghan-Soviet war 1979-… | Flickr
Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing.  The question then will be: who got worn down?  One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.

Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons.  That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them.  But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done.  Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin.  Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps.  Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960.  Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights.  Don’t you think that he knows this?  Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?

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But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics.  A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump.  A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter.  Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky.  Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them.  Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.

Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere.  It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.

Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge.  See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe.  Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.

Impeachment witness Alexander Vindman says in op-ed 'doing what's right matters'
Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.

So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene.  VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.

VDH, I’ve got your complaints.  Now, what do we do?  If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe?  Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by?  Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.?  It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem.  It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.

It still comes down to one question: what do we do?  Do nothing?  If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes.  I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan.  Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.

Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words.  If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield.  Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that.  Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out.  Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.

Ukraine destroy Russian tank with drone in 'extraordinary' footage | World | News | Express.co.uk
Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).

Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi.  The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime.  Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine.  It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.

My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess.  Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine.  Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world.  That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.

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RogerG

See and read more here:

* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE

* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html

* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/

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Biden-Inspired Dirigisme and Freezing in Your Home

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Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.

Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.

Here we go again.  We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure.  Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia.  We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up.  It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots.  The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes.  The misery has the same source: government with too much power.

The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.

Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank.  Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his.  Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”.  He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here.  To me that’s not unbearable yet.”  He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil.  It’s one or the other.”

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Tim Wisley’s thermostat setting
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Screenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”

Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year.  The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.

What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery.  Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms.  Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?

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It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022.  A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration).  The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.

Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate.  Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la.  Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut.  Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery?  I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.

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Los Angeles in a blackout?

Higher demand for natural gas?  This is winter.  Has anyone checked with Buffalo?  Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons?  This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.

Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”.  What “energy exports”?  It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from.  You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery.  Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin.  Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy.  But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels.  The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable.  All for what?  A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century?  We’ve had warming periods in the past.  Heck, Britain once had vineyards.  And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death).  Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.

American man frozen to death by extreme snow – Paragon Page

The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .?  I can’t believe it was a preference for this.  Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability.  Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health.  Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery.  In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.

Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi.  I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity.  You know, doing the same thing but . . . .

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices

* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html

* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html

* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/

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Biden, the Prevaricator-In-Chief; Trump, the Obstacle; and an Eviscerated Energy Industry

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Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump.  What a pickle for the American people.  Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives.  It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.

There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump.  They are stuck in 2016.  Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate.  He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act.  He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped.  Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century).  The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.

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Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021

Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more.  The act is getting old.  He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle.  Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”.  Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.”  What a narcissist.  Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.”  Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender.  After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them.  He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable.  Need more proof?

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Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery.  No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt.  Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically.  It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry.  Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland.  And he’s lying about it.

Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies.  Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .”  Lie.  See chart below.  Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.”  Lie.  What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?

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Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference

There’s more where those came from.  It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.”  The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back.  Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere.  We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game?  Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases?  The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s.  No big pipelines for you, America.  Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion.  Of course, let’s lie about it.  While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together.  If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.

A natural gas wellhead.
A capped oil well in the US.

Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market.  Fear is an animal spirit.  So is hostility.  You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter.  Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus.  Forget about more refineries and more exploration.  Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.

The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden.  The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden.  Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca.  Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on.  Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses.  It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices.  Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared.  Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments.  It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.

Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always.  It’s a cluster*#&@.  Welcome to Biden world.

Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast.  Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office.  It was $2.39.  Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication?   Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths.  Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him.   Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain.  Is this a difference without a difference?  Can’t say.

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Fuel prices in Los Angeles, March 2022

Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year.  It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant.  It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021.  Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before.  For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.

The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay.  People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning.  Biden ritually does it.  Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it.  Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture.  With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie.  Something to ponder.

Glenn Russell/The Burlington Free Press via AP
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”
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Biden’s inauguration

RogerG

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* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/

* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html

* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/

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Ukraine and the Bursting of Bubbles

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Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent.  I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right.  There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”.  Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America.  It’s incoherent, but there it is.  Bubble #1.

That’s not all.  Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites.  The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life.  This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.

Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles.  In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out.  One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors.  In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not.  Sorry Tulsi and Tucker.  One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders.  Is this carte blanche for intervention?  No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned.  When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th.  Weakness invites horrors.

Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth.  A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light.  As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity.  The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.

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Russian energy giant Gazprom
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Working on the Nordstream 2 pipeline in December 2019, now halted due to Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (The times of London photo)

Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep.  For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya.  The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR.  Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour.  Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign.  Done deal.  Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass.  After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.

In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps.  And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves.  But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades?  I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country.  Odd.  It’s perplexing.  Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?

Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined.  Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR.  Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.

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Victims of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, waiting for burial.

No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail.  The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance.  Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”  Not even diplomacy works without it.  That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit.  The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety.  Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind.  State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out.  Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.

The formula applies to us as well.  To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it.  The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits.  Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too?  Say goodbye to Taiwan.  Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license.  No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.

Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2.  Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia.  Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio.  The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures.  The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following.  Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.

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North Sea windmills

Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine.  Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal.  Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.

Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels.  But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover.  And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks.  When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed).  Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.

In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland.  For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters.  Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right.  Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear.  Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place.  At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.

This resembles a mid-winter scene after the second day of snow in Chisinau, Moldova
Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.

RogerG