I'd like to know what Drezner's baseline is for his speculation that we might be returning to normalcy

 Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has an essay at his Substack that he clearly intends readers to take as a note of cheer. It's entitled "Is the Country Getting . . . Better?"

Now, Drezner has a track record that appeals to me. He was a registered Republican who supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. He publicly expressed his misgivings about Donald Trump by being a signatory to a letter from several national-security specialists in 2016, and left the GOP. a year later. My kind of guy in a very important sense.

And I appreciate his guarded optimism in this piece. He begins by spelling out how gloomy things have looked for the past several years:

The last six years or so have felt like one of those video boxing games in which the announcer yells “body blow” on repeat, but for the entire country. The United States has been through a lot, from the chaos of the Trump administration to the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic to the disruptions of the George Floyd protests to the violence of January 6th to the uncertainties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m eliding a lot in that last sentence but you get the point. These have been interesting times to live through, which is a polite way of saying they have been exhausting. 

Along with the big shocks came a host of smaller tells suggesting that America had lost its damn mind. Data points like the rise in “air rage” and “road rage” incidents suggested a country in which the social fabric was being torn asunder. The midterm elections, featuring a whole host of truly oddball candidates, seemed to be another sign that bad things were coming down the pike. Some of my political science colleagues were gaming out how a second Civil War could emerge. 

I'm not sure that the balm he applies to the current juncture has much depth to it, however:

Then something unexpected happened: by albeit razor-thin margins, normalcy seemed to make a comeback. The midterm elections proved to be infertile soil for nutjob candidates in swing states; Raphael Warnock’s defeat of werewolf-loving Herschel Walker in Georgia was the cherry on top of this delicious normalcy sundae. As Axios’ Jim VandeHei put it: “The past few months prove that for all the hyperventilating and self-loathing, normal America is prevailing over the loudmouths on the left and the right who dominate our screens…. Yes, politics remains alarmingly polarized and Twitter, a hot mess. At the same time, most of America is busy being more nuanced and normal than what you often see on the screen.”

Now, when one juxtaposes Warnock as a foil to Walker, one can say we did indeed dodge a bullet.  But Warnock is no centrist. He's tried to play the race card to whitewash his brother's drug conviction. He claims that he's on solid ground as a Christian pastor in his position that abortion is fine even up to moments before birth. His shoddy behavior as a father is at odds with his advocacy for women and children. And he wanted to see a federal election law enacted to head Georgia's law off at the pass, even though that law did not hamper voter turnout.

But back to Drezner's piece. He cites statistics concerning social ill such as road rage to bolster his case:

Is there evidence for Hayes’ supposition? There’s some! A glance at the Federal Aviation Administration’s data shows that the number of air rage incidents per flight has declined considerably during 2022, which is impressive given the number of flight delays and cancellations that occurred earlier this year. The decline appears to be due to a combination of the FAA pursuing a “no tolerance” policy combined with the end of the mask mandate on flights. Road rage data is a little harder to come by, but the number of motor-vehicle fatalities is trending ever-so-slightly downward compared to 2021. The murder rate also appears to have declined compared to 2021. Some economic stresses, like inflation or supply chain disruptions, appear to be easing as well.

But what I want to know is this: Has he established a baseline from which he's able to form a metric?

 Because the Overton window has been dramatically shifting for many years. Consider that Barack Obama came into office as president proclaiming his stance that marriage was between one man and one woman. Some years later, when Obergefell v Hodges was decided, he had the White House lit up in rainbow colors. Now we have a transgender Health and Human Services secretary. DEI is pervasive throughout government at all levels. 

In a piece I wrote at my own Substack earlier this year, I made the case that the window shift goes back decades. In the course of making my point, I cited some statistics that don't paint a pretty picture at all:

Some very basic aspects of American life that were taken as givens in my childhood have undergone profound changes in ensuing decades. The marriage rate, in steady decline for years, fell to an all-time low in 2018. As of 2019, the US had the highest number of children living in a single-parent household in the world. 

Three in ten Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.

The number of Americans identifying as something other than heterosexual has doubled in the last decade.

Drug-overdose deaths in the US reached another record high this year.

As we all know, the spree-killing trend, which got underway in 1966, when Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas campus tower in Austin and shot 16 people, has made our present year a grim succession of carnage scenes of near-daily occurrence.

So I'd say Drezner's search for a ray of sunlight depends on accepting that we ease into the way things are at the expense of having a conversation about how they should be. 

But, then, it might be awfully late in the day for me to hope for something like that.

 

 

Georgia, Arizona and the still-dim prospects for the GOP recovering its sanity

 Raphael Warnock's Senate-seat victory over Hershel Walker has its roots in the Republican Party's indulgence of the Very Stable Genius's big-baby reality denial in late 2020 and early 2021. His allies urged rural Georgia voters to boycott the January 5 runoff election pitting Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Trump himself kept his drool-besotted cult followers agitated with his hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger ("The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.")

Georgia had been a pretty reliably red state for some time. It still is, to a considerable degree. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger handily won re-election last month. And Warnock is an extreme leftist. But the state's voters wisely backed away from the Trumpist Kool-Aid. I don't envy their options at all. 

So the Senate is now 51-49. It didn't have to be this way, but it's what you get when Trump still looms so large in the national psyche. 

In Arizona, Kari Lake has taken that page out of the Trumpist playbook. She is still calling her defeat a sham even as all counties in the state have certified the election results. She looks poised to do what she can to burn down any vestige of political good will, just as the VSG is determined to do to the national Republican Party if it dares to veer even slightly from kowtowing to him. 

The party is definitely still less than hospitable to actual conservatives - you know, the ones who saw that embracing Trump and what he was unleashing from the summer of 2015 onward. Those who aren't nuts or sycophants never pass up a chance to show that they are cowards. 

I'm not impressed by this Forward Party, and my early enthusiasm for Principles First has atrophied a bit.

So I remain politically homeless. But I remain vexed by this question: How hard can it be to articulate the convincing message of real conservatism and keep the batshit nuttery out of it?

Well, then, say his name

 There's pushback, doncha know, among the Pubs:

A handful of prominent Republicans . .  were pressed to weigh in on Sunday programs.

Rep.-elect Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said "Well, obviously, I don’t support that" in an interview on CNN’s "State of the Union."

"The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American. And so I certainly don’t endorse that language or that sentiment. I think the question for everyone is how we move forward," Lawler said, adding that he thinks Americans are “tired of discussing the grievances of prior elections” and that Trump would be “well-advised to focus on the future, if he is going to run for president again.”

Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, lamented that Trump’s remarks have become a “consistent trend,” pointing out that the former president had demanded that Pence put the Constitution aside to overturn the election results after he lost reelection to Joe Biden.

"The president’s remarks, the company he’s keeping, I think is way beyond the fold,” Short said during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, similarly dismissed Trump’s call for the termination of the Constitution in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said, “It’s certainly not consistent with the oath we all take."

But Turner sidestepped when asked whether the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election should make such a statement. While he said he “vehemently disagrees” with the former president’s statement, Turner did not directly answer the question, even after host Margaret Brennan pressed repeatedly.

“There is a political process that has to go forward before anyone is a frontrunner or anybody is even a candidate for the party,” Turner said. “And I believe, answering your question, that people certainly are going to take into consideration a statement like this as they evaluate a candidate.”

Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, also appeared reluctant to condemn Trump’s remarks during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week.” 

Joyce said he was unaware of what the former president posted and that “people were not interested in looking backwards” when asked to respond to Trump’s statement.

Pressed on whether he can support a candidate in 2024 who wants to suspend the Constitution, Joyce said that he will choose “whoever the Republican nominee is” because he expects Trump to have many challengers in 2024. He also said the former president lacks the authority to carry out his “fantasy” of suspending the Constitution.

The big dawgs are so far mum:

As of Sunday morning, Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as well as the Republican National Committee had not publicly commented on Trump’s post. NBC News reached out to spokespeople for McConnell, McCarthy and the RNC for comment Saturday but did not receive any response.

This is why I no longer consider myself a Republican. No one in the leadership echelons is willing to speak the entire truth of the matter. In fact, they are all hedging their bets, doing what they can not to jeopardize their political options, given the current still-the-case claim the Very Stable Genius has on the GOP. 

Sorry, can't sign up for that. 

 

 

 

 

The bill averting a rail workers' strike - initial thoughts

 Some interesting fault lines appearing in this one.

As of this writing - Friday afternoon - the president has signed it. It does not expand the paid leave to seven days. Congress seems to be taking its cue from the fact that eight four railway-related unions with the majority of he industry's workers support an agreement that included a number of other favorable features from labor's standpoint, but not the paid sick leave. Four didn't support it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in hot water with the Democratic Socialists of America for voting for the bill in the form Biden signed. Most other Squad members also voted in the affirmative.

This also, rather interestingly, puts her position in resonance with that of Marco Rubio: 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Thursday that she and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., had found common ground in the potential rail worker strike that has concerned many across the nation.

“A rarity,” she said in reference to a tweet from the Florida Republican earlier this week in which he said he would object to a deal that does not reflect the wishes of the workers.

“The railways and workers should go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept,” he said in a post Tuesday. “I will not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”

Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the message and said, “Glad we are on the same page [regarding] railworkers’ paid sick days.”

“The House just sent over what you asked for: the full TA deal w/ sick days as supported and demanded by our railworkers. Can they count on your YES vote for the amendment?” she questioned.

Rubio seems to have found an opportunity for his common-good-conservatism rubber to hit the actual-legislation road. 

And he may have found solid ground to do so. Morale in railway jobs seems to be in the pits:

Even if paid sick leave is secured, rail workers have years of bad feelings around their employers. Jason Doering, who has worked at Union Pacific for 18 years, told me in July that even a good contract would not solve “rock-bottom” morale issues. 

“Everybody goes to work and there’s nothing positive to talk about,” said Doering, who is also the Nevada legislative director for SMART Transportation Division, a labor union of train, airline and other transportation workers. “There are no positive things going on within the industry. You are forced to choose between your career and your life.” 

Doering previously said workdays lasting up to 19 hours, consisting of 12-hour shifts and hours of waiting around for transportation or relief crews, have become the norm. So too has spending more time in motels waiting for one’s next gig than at one’s actual home. 

The other side of this matter, though, is the human-agency factor. Nobody's forcing these people to be in these jobs. Let us not lose sight of the element of choice. Yes, they have built lives on the basis of the financial planning they're able to do, but at some point doesn't one become miserable enough to investigate alternative ways to make a living?

Industry consolidation has permitted the remaining firms to say to shippers, "Face it, we're the only games in town." That's not healthy for a railway industry that works for everyone:

Decades of consolidation have left the U.S. with only seven Class I railroad companies. Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad.

Thus, most shippers can’t credibly threaten to take their business elsewhere. At the margin, rail customers could shift their transport needs toward trucking, but most are reliant on the inherent scale and efficiency of rail transport. So when freight carriers reduce their operating costs, they’re less inclined to pass on those savings in the form of improved customer service or lower rates than to simply shower their shareholders in dividends.

Last year, the seven dominant North American railways had a combined net income of $27 billion, nearly twice their margin a decade ago. In the interim, the railways have collectively doled out $146 billion in dividends and stock buybacks while investing only $116 billion into their businesses.

This, of course, isn't the first time government has intervened in a standoff between two private-sector entities (a union and a management consortium). The rational given generally seems to Article 1, Section 8 of he Constitution, which addresses interstate commerce, as well as the 1926 Railway Labor Act. 

Sometimes government has gotten quite brazen, as was the case in in 1952: 

During the Korean War the government imposed controls on raw materials, production, shipping, credit, wages, and prices. When the wage-price controls created a collective-bargaining impasse in the steel industry, threatening a nationwide strike, President Harry S. Truman ordered the secretary of commerce on April 8, 1952, to seize and operate most of the country’s steel mills for the ostensible purpose of maintaining production of critical munitions.

Owners of the seized properties obtained a court injunction against the seizure, and an appeal of that injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court gave rise to one of the “great cases” in constitutional law, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer.1 Although the Court found the President’s actions to be unconstitutional, its decision did not signify a triumph of private rights or a significant check on the government’s exercise of de facto emergency powers.

By 1952 Truman had become an unpopular president, even among Democrats, and his attempted seizure evinced a power struggle with a hostile Congress. He had alternative ways to proceed. Although no current statute authorized him to nationalize the steel industry, he had authority under the Taft-Hartley Act to order an 80-day “cooling- off period,” during which the union- management dispute might have been settled without a strike. The pro-union President chose not to issue such an order, however, because he opposed the Taft-Hartley Act, which Congress had passed over his veto in 1947. He did not ask Congress to authorize his seizure of the steel industry.

Instead, Truman rested his seizure order on legally vague national-emergency grounds, citing his inherent powers as president and as commander in chief of the armed forces.2 Afterward, he and his official spokesman sought clumsily “to transform the steel crisis from a particular labor dispute into a broader battle against ‘big business,’” a rendering that had little resonance.3

You see, he had, in the parlance of a more recent decade, a pen and a phone.

I am not at all comfortable with what's going down. 

I understand that a strike would bring the economy to a screaming halt, and that even national security could be imperiled. I also understand the crummy life railway workers have had for several years. 

But when the entity with a monopoly on legitimate use of coercion and force inserts itself into a private-sector disagreement between two parties each striving for a favorable outcome, I bristle. That's the rationale climate alarmists use to take away the choice of energy forms people use. 

The labor-management relationship is really one of producer and consumer. Management would like to consume what labor is producing, provided a compensation package it finds within its budget can be agreed on.

When we erode this basic principle, even for what appear to be compelling reasons, we do freedom no favors. 

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu teaches philosophy at a university in Korea. He's not exactly a ray of sunshine, but his insights are often valuable, as is the case with this post at his blog, "Melancholy, Modernity and the Free Soul":

Modernity has largely robbed melancholy of its meaning and cosmic significance, by robbing freedom of its meaning and psychological significance. Modern philosophy, obsessed with practical equality and its thought-diminishing fantasy of universal enlightenment, has redefined freedom as randomness, or rather, stated in political terms, as the right to be random. This is freedom reduced to spiritual chaos and lack of purpose, except for the deflated purpose of protecting and aggrandizing the chaos itself, which purpose we moderns call “self-preservation,” or even, more recently, “self-fulfillment.” 

Having lived so long in the dim light of this degraded notion of freedom, it now seems counterintuitive to us, or even self-contradictory, to see freedom as the ancient thinkers did, namely as a higher (i.e., nobler) form of limitation or restraint — the self-restraint of the civilized individual, who neither requires nor responds to any external coercion to live rationally — which derives its meaning by analogy with the relation of the true governor to his governed domain.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic examines "Why Everything in Tech Seems To e Collapsing All At Once":

The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis.

After using its metaphorical youth to experiment with social media and consumer tech through boundless investment and endless optimizations and A/B tests, many tech executives and investors today feel like they’ve essentially solved the most interesting and important problems of basic digitization. This is not just my opinion: Four years ago, the tech analyst Ben Evans observed that software had scaled the mountain of advertising and media and connected the world, and tech was looking to climb new mountains and find new challenges. One chapter was closing, and the most prominent tech executives and investors were looking for the next story.

Executives of the largest tech firms have for years been shifting resources toward new ventures with uncertain returns. Amazon recently employed more than 10,000 people to work on its AI product, Alexa. (Jeff Bezos stepped away from the company he founded to work on rocket ships.) At Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—Reality Labs, the division working to build a metaverse, has about 15,000 employees. Apple reportedly has 3,000 people working on an augmented-reality headset, and thousands more are working on Google’s voice assistant. At the same time, the venture-capital community has been looking for its own moonshot, and many investors have found one (or, at least, have wanted people to believe that they have) in crypto. VCs have reportedly bet dozens of billions of dollars in the space, even though, for all the bluster and investment, it mostly remains a technology in search of a use case beyond betting money on tokens that cash out in dollars. Meanwhile, in what may be a literal midlife crisis, Elon Musk, a car and rocket executive, has installed himself at the helm of a digital delivery mechanism for news outrage with, at best, a chaotic plan for resurrecting its business.

He concludes that most likely "we are in an intermission between technological epochs."

"'Vital Tension' as the Creative Spiritual Energy of History" by Charles Klamut at The Imaginative Conservative  looks at this concept's uses and misuses through the centuries:

“Vital tension” is a phrase used in the writings of Christopher Dawson to describe the unique source of creative spiritual energy which has inspired the great personalities and achievements of Western culture.

Dawson was an intellectual and cultural historian of the 20^th century whose life work was dedicated to studying the relationship between religion and culture. He insisted that behind every culture is a religion, and that behind Western culture is Christianity. While aware of the baggage of Christianity so scorned by secular critics, Dawson demonstrated the overwhelmingly positive creative force Christianity has been overall as the driving religious ideal behind Western culture.

Christianity helped transform the deadly violent tension of tribalism and ideological strife, transferring it inward to a vital moral and spiritual tension played out in the realm of personal responsibility, conscience, conversion, and, ultimately, love. This had very positive and creative implications over the course of Western cultural history. The pattern of accuse others/excuse self was reversed, as followers of the way of Jesus sought to first get the “plank” out of their own eye rather than the “speck” from their neighbor’s eye.

The condemnation of “those people” was replaced by the new command of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations, gathering all into oneness under the headship of Jesus. Self-assertion was replaced with self-emptying. Domination was replaced by service. Revenge was replaced by forgiveness. The first centuries of Christianity saw the church grow through the sacrificial death of the martyrs and the love of its adherents toward one another and even toward their enemies. In imitation of Jesus, the early Christians helped establish the church by shedding their own blood, not that of others.

Dawson sought to demonstrate that history is a dynamic spiritual process whose best fruits are the result of concentrated personal and collective moral and spiritual effort. And, correlatively, its worst fruits are the result of the abandonment of this process.

Dawson drew from the tradition of the Gospels and St Paul, with their teachings on personal repentance and conversion. The spirit and the flesh are two opposing principles of the will (a moral, not a metaphysical distinction), and through the grace of the Holy Spirit comes the real possibility of personal and societal renewal. A careful study of Western culture provides an accumulation of evidence and examples, to which Dawson’s lifetime body of scholarly work testifies.

Dawson especially drew on St Augustine’s development of this tradition and his idea of the two cities: the city of God, characterized by love of God to the contempt of self; and the city of man, characterized by the love of self to the contempt of God. This was a moral, rather than metaphysical, distinction. It occurs beneath the surface of events, beginning in the hidden realm of personal existential choice. The unfolding of history is a playing out of these two opposing moral principles, beginning in the heart of each person.

But that conception of vital tension has fizzled out in our lifetimes:

More recent times, with shrinking notions of the moral and spiritual (though not scientific and technical) possibilities of humanity, have seen a reversion from“vital tension” back to the external tensions played out in the realm of post modern ideologies. From the scandalous wars between religions following the Reformation in the 17^th century, through the revolutions of the 18^th and19^thcentury, through the fascist and communist scourges of the 20^th century, and into the current era of Al Qaeda and the “clash of civilizations,” or the many lesser clashes played out between red state-blue state, 99%-1%, etc. We see the pattern playing out time and again, in more and less bloody forms but nevertheless, charged with acrimony and volatility.

Much of the strife of recent centuries, argues Dawson, can be linked to the abandonment of the Christian ideal of vital tension which was the chief source of creative spiritual energy for so many centuries since the coming of Christ. What we are seeing in its progressive abandonment is a reversion to the blood feud, played out ideologically. The pre-existent psychological pattern of moral dualism, the fruit of Christianity, is abandoned and instead sublimated and transferred outward again into new and more sophisticated forms.

How's this for a stark verdict?

 Modern man is a spiritual failure.

This is the provocation with which Christopher Dawson begins the first chapter of Understanding Europe, written in 1952. It is a theme that runs throughout his works. Why is modern man a spiritual failure? Because he has proven unable to control the new forces he has created. Educated, economically shrewd, technologically advanced, materially successful… none of these have been enough to hold at bay the centrifugal, de-unifying tendencies unleashed by the abandonment of the Christian ideal of personal conversion and a universal spiritual society. Evidence of these tendencies is seen in the trajectory of history for especially the past four or five centuries, up through today’s postmodern era of widespread alienation and division and global volatility, and in the nihilism and despair which stifle and censor serious attempts at higher meaning and authentic human aspiration, at least in the developed, post-industrial Western world.

Power the Future, a consortium of thinkers focused on a sane energy policy, has released an itemized roadmap for achieving one. The top ten solutions it offers are these:

1. Repeal Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Tax   7

2. EndBiden’sOilandGasLeasingMoratorium/
   Return Power to States   7

3. Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline   9

4. Block Biden’s ESG Regulations   9

5. Repeal the California Waiver   10

6. End Activist-led “Sue and Settle” and “Citizen Lawsuits”   11

7. Ban Use of the “Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases”   12

8. Automatic Approvals for LNG Export Terminals   13

9. Overturn Massachusetts v. EPA   14

10.Stop Biden’s War on Coal   15

A lady named Beanie has a Substack focused on the state of education and what might be done about it. An essay there entitled "The Damage of Academic Decline Is Exposed" posits that it's not just the impact of COVID that has brought about such a bleak landscape. We've been headed to our present juncture for decades. What to do?

Will we put a bandaid on the blister and strap on the same shoes that created it in the first place? Or will we decide to implement educational techniques that will allow optimal learning and set students up to truly excel? Just as one shoe doesn’t fit every person exactly right, it is unlikely that one type of learning environment will fit every student just right. We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of American education (and the future of millions of children) right now and have plenty of evidence to support its need. One step is allowing families, not the government, the ability to choose the best learning environment for their children. Another is reviving reading instruction techniques that are proven to put more students on the path to literacy proficiency. 

Ian Birrell, writing at UnHerd, looks at how disgraced FTX hustler Sam Bankman-Fried is jus the latest embodiment of a trend Birrell calls "elitist altruism": 

Elizabeth Holmes dressed in the same style every day: black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and black low-slung shoes. This “uniform” underlined her deified status as a busy billionaire dedicated to changing the world, setting her apart from mere mortals with time to choose their clothes. “My mom had me in black turtlenecks when I was, like, eight,” she told one women’s magazine. “I probably have 150 of these. It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life. All my focus is on the work. I take it so seriously; I’m sure that translates into how I dress.”

Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.

Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)

Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.

It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.

Birrell basically warns us to ask ourselves if we'd really want a savior to bee as arrogant as these people:

Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.

 Matt Labash, one of the best essayists of our time, knocks it out of the park once again with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" at SlackTide, his Substack. Not even gonna try to tease you with excerpts. You need to read the whole thing. It's deeply human and heartfelt, with a leavening touch of his characteristic acerbity. There is and always has been a surfeit of enjoy-life's-blessings-as-they-happen literature. It takes a really fresh approach to stand out in the genre. Trust me, Labash has provided one.

For a long time, I've yearned for someone to pen a really effective takedown of half-baked smartass Robert Reich, who offers vague pieties as economic solutions and peddles "fairness" as the aim of economic policy at the expense of even rudimentarily sound analysis. Paul Roderick Gregory, an economics professor at the University of Houston and Hoover Institution research fellow writing at Forbes, has taken on the task splendidly and systematically. It's gonna leave a mark.

And I've been busy at my Substack, Precipice. My three latest are "Is Versus Should Be," which looks at the fine line between a candid assessment of the lay of the land and being resigned to it, a little something different entitled "The Best to You Each Morning," a look at the colorful figures involved in the development of America's breakfast cereal industry, and "An Unfortunate New Fissure in an Already Narrow Sliver of Terrain," which looks at David French's take on the Respect for Marriage Act and the subsequent fallout from that, 

 

 

 

 

Fortunately, the latest attempt by our pointy-headed overlords to halt human advancement was short on specifics

 . . . but we must not take our eye off of further developments now that the COP27 summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt has concluded. It did so without issuing a grand statement of what was accomplished and what the plan is going forward, and this reparations plan for less-developed countries is nothing but vague wording at this point, but attendees will continue to work on it.

China and Saudi Arabia were the parties that gummed up the works for a big statement:

The world has failed to reach an agreement to phase out fossil fuels after marathon UN climate talks were “stonewalled” by a number of oil-producing nations.

Negotiators from nearly 200 countries at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt took the historic step of agreeing to set up a “loss and damage” fund meant to help vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters and agreed the globe needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030.

The agreement also reaffirmed the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

However, an attempt to address the biggest source of the planet warming emissions that are causing the climate crisis ended in a fiasco after a number of nations, including China and Saudi Arabia, blocked a key proposal to phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal.

Neither of those two nations is my cup of tea generally speaking, but they do deserve our gratitude for slamming on the brakes with regard to abandoning normal-people energy forms.

And with regard to this loss-and-damages scheme, by which advanced countries would pay lesser-developed ones for - for what? bringing more safety, comfort and convenience to their societies? - there are no details in place yet to guide the overlords in how to do it:

Details on how the fund would operate remain murky. The text leaves a lot of questions on when it will be finalized and become operational, and how exactly it would be funded. The text also mentions a transitional committee that will help nail down those details, but doesn’t set specific future deadlines.

Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal extirpates the faux nobility of this whole undertaking. I'm going to excerpt generously, because it's so well articulated and so important:

Before they left their air-conditioned hotels and hopped into limousines to take them to their jets for the long journey home, these courageous fighters for carbon neutrality agreed to create a fund on the principle that rich countries like the U.S. should compensate poor countries for the damage caused by climate change. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, long opposed this idea, justifiably fearing that it represents an open-ended scheme to funnel American taxpayers’ money to beacons of planet-saving good governance like South Africa, Pakistanand Indonesia.

The idea is that developing countries are being literally inundated with the costs of climate change in the form of rising sea levels, extreme weather and the other horsemen of the meteorological apocalypse. Developed countries are responsible for most of the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere and therefore should be made to pay for the costs of climate damage to small developing countries that have contributed little to the planet’s warming.

There are several problems with this.

We are all moved by scenes from the disasters the climate lobby cites to justify its plans, such as those from Pakistan’s devastating floods this summer. Simple human compassion compels those of us more fortunate to want to assist.

But aside from the big question of how many of these weather events are actually caused by man-made climate change, we know that the human cost of these disasters is much smaller today than it was before we were alarmed by the climate alarmists.

In his brilliant dissection of the climate extremists’ case in his book, “Unsettled,” Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in President Obama’s Energy Department, notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted in the era of global warming. Citing data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he notes that “weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one hundred years” and are “about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.”

Why? Almost entirely thanks to improvements in infrastructure and mitigation enabled by rapid industrialization.

A second problem is that under the agreed plan, China and India, as “developing countries,” haven’t agreed to contribute to the fund but have made only vague commitments to assist. So countries whose emissions have grown rapidly in the past decade will be exempt while the U.S., whose emissions have been declining, are on the hook.

Above all, the idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialization and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of “climate justice,” but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the “reparations” climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialize for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.

If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?

Maybe Pakistan could have become a thriving economy with little industrial activity, producing carbon-free economic growth and prosperity for its people. But the nation’s gross domestic product per capita has roughly tripled in the past 50 years, and I’d wager that a significant amount of that growth has been the result of innovations such as the combustion engine, air conditioning, the microchip, the personal computer and all the other wonders of the developed world.

And while the CNN story linked and excerpted above gives the impression that African nations are on board with this scheme, let us recall some recent evidence to the contrary we discussed here at LITD:

 This lady gets it:

African countries will use the COP27 climate talks in Egypt next month to advocate for a common energy position that sees fossil fuels as necessary to expanding economies and electricity access, the continent's top energy official said on Tuesday.

The African position, criticised by environmental groups, could overshadow global climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh seeking to build on the previous Glasgow summit and make good on financing targets by rich nations to poorer countries that have fallen far short of the promised $100 billion a year by 2020.

"We recognize that some countries may have to use fossil fuels for now, but it’s not one solution fits all," said Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union (AU) Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy.

"It is not time to exclude, but it is the time to tailor solutions for a context," she told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference.

An AU technical study attended by 45 African countries on 16 June seen by Reuters outlined that oil and coal will play a "crucial role" in expanding modern energy access over the short to medium term.

In tandem with renewable sources, Africa also sees key roles for natural gas and nuclear energy.

"Our ambition is to have fast-growing economies, competitive and industrialised," Abou-Zeid said.

 As do these folks:

"Africa has woken up and we are going to exploit our natural resources," said Uganda Energy Minister Ruth Nankabirwa Ssentamu.

"There is no way you can develop any economy, any society without energy," said Omar Farouk Ibrahim, secretary general of the African Petroleum Producers' Organisation.

"We are talking about coal, we are talking oil and we are talking about gas. At this time we are not discriminating," he told Reuters.

As does this guy:

N. J. Ayuk, Executive Chairman at the African Energy Chamber, is forthright in his view: “Africans don’t hate Oil and Gas companies. We love Oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialize. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see Oil and Gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonization of oil and gas companies will not work.”

That's visionary leadership right there. 

So while there's some comfort in knowing that COP27's outcomes remain vague and grandiose at present, let us not forget that the overlords, having gone back home, will stay in touch and strive to turn it all into a tangible blueprint for tyranny and decline. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quick takes on four matters currently on the nation's plate

 Elon Musk/Twitter - With staff ranging from comms people to critical systems engineers bailing by the thousands and by the hour, one is seeing a lot of been-nice-mutually-following-you-here-here-are-my other-social-media-platform-addresses tweets. 

Some are arguing that the Musk takeover is exactly what was needed at Twitter, that it was just classic fat-trimming. But he set about steering the company toward the most toxic organizational culture he could have. He sure got a decisive response to his if-you're-on-board-with-our-new-hardcore-work-pace-respond-by-5 PM ultimatum. 

I've just really had it with arrogant rich guys swaggering into business situations and upending everything just to stroke their own egos. The world needs less bullying, not more. 

Ukraine - Within a week, the country went from the jubilation of liberating Kherson to experiencing the most sustained missile attack from Russia since the invasion began. With a moment of hair-raising drama for the West, with the missile explosion in Poland. Zelensky is still insisting that the circumstances of that aren't decisively determined, but I think that's because he, quite understandably, is inclined to smell the hint of a threat in any development. Let us hope Western support for this valuable ally doesn't waver.

Trump's announcement - The actual event in the gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom was underwhelming. All the photos I've seem of him stepping off the stage afterward show him scowling. What's up with that? 

From the better-late-than-never file, some evangelical leaders who have supported the Very Stable Genius are considering that it was a bad bet.  

Donors are bailing.

Ivanka telling her dad that she's not going anywhere near this 2024 campaign is an interesting development. She's long struck me as far less prone to ate-up-edness than her brothers - the ones with the same mother as her. 

It's not 2016 anymore. 

The new House majority's intentions - Oh, sheesh. It hasn't taken any time at all for incoming committee chairs to signal plans to launch investigations, with Hunter Biden first and foremost among them. Look, it's no secret that Hunter's been an unsavory character. His laptop is an undeniably juicy piece of electronics. But with inflation still raging, crime out of control in way too many cities, a southern border more porous than ever, and with questions about how involved - or not - the federal government should be in eduction surrounding that issue's red-hot current status, this looks like a squandering of a ripe opportunity. One does hear House Pubs speaking of working to steer energy policy in a common-sense direction and some other initiatives that have actual relevance to national wellbeing, but they are sullied by this zeal for investigations.

Respect for Marriage Act - Dems' bundling of interracial marriage with same-sex "marriage" allowed them to be disingenuous about situations like that of Mitch McConnell, who voted against it, even as he's married to a Chinese woman. Saw what you did there.

There's a supremely dismaying piece at Christianity Today that takes the hey-we-just-have-to-acknowledge-that-this-is-now-the-lay-of-the-land attitude that I decried in a recent Precipice post. One v can be so into what is that one decides that what should be is not worth pursuing. And I have to wonder why new CT editor Russell Moore was cool with running a piece that asserts that "in a morally pluralistic society, a few concession yield a win for the common good." That's tacitly granting that the United States is a fundamentally different country from what it was fifteen years ago. 

The basic architecture of the universe is apparent not only in the way human families have formed over the course of our history's species, but in the sexual behavior of every other species defined by the male-female dichotomy. We are trying to define what is beyond our capacity to define. It will not end well. 

Mitch McConnell

 Interesting fissures within the Republican Party are appearing.

I've seen an attempt to distance national conservatism from MAGA. With all due respect, it looks to me like a distinction with little difference. NatCon was never anything but an attempt to lend some coherence to Trumpism, without much success.

There's also the current debate on whether Mitch McConnell is an effective leader of Pubs in the Senate. Of course, the MAGA fever swamp's take is that the GOP became a new critter in 2016 - for the better, in their estimation - and whatever usefulness McConnell had had was irrelevant in the new landscape. But he has his staunch defenders as well.

I have found him frustrating over the years. Maybe part of my predisposition is on superficial grounds. His barely-flappable demeanor and his appearance (I can't get over George Will's likening him to a turtle) seemed not quite up to the task in a few situations over the years. He never employed brinkmanship in debt-ceiling debates, for instance. Most recently, his affirmative response to the question of whether he'd support Trump in a 2024 presidential race - well, made me sick.

But I'm just a pundit in flyover country. There's a lot about what's required to maneuver successfully in the Senate over the course of a long career that I'm quite sure I know next to nothing about. I'm willing to interpret his measured tone of voice and care to avoid inflammatory wording as a steadiness of nerves that his position requires.

And I want to make clear that I have no problem whatsoever with the obstructionist stance he took during the Obama years. He did what he could to prevent and then repeal the "Affordable" Care Act and stimulus packages. Those positions earn my loud applause.

I think I weigh in on the side of the current debate that says he needs to stay put as Senate Minority Leader. It's a position that requires chops one doesn't acquire quickly. McConnell knows the lay of the land, and, in that understated way of his, will surely proceed on the understanding that Trumpism is toxic for the Republican future. I think the recent midterm results have deepened that understanding. 

Anybody else that the opposition in this debate would put forward would have at least some taint of NatCon/MAGA, I think. Sticking with Mitch is a wise first step in seeing if that infection can be cured.