China, Russia and the nature of their alliance / understanding

 A year ago, the Putin regime made up its mind that it would embrace pariah status. What would be required to restore Russia's ability to be accepted in polite company on the world stage is pretty much inconceivable. 

China is every bit as much of a rogue nation as Russia, but Xi's savvy and energetic diplomacy moves have positioned it better strategically.

Russia goes more for in-your-face belligerence:

Russia could have its most powerful and quiet nuclear attack submarines on persistent patrols off either U.S. Coast in the next two years, the head of U.S. Northern Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

In response to questions from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on the threat of Chinese and Russian cruise missile submarines operating close to the U.S., NORTHCOM commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said that the deployments of the Russian Yasen-class nuclear cruise missile attack boats have been deploying more frequently.

“[The risk is] absolutely increasing. Within the last year, Russia has also placed their [Yasens] in the Pacific,” he said.
“Now not only the Atlantic, but we also have them in the Pacific and it’s just a matter of time – probably a year or two – before that’s a persistent threat, 24 hours a day. … That impact has reduced decision space for a national senior leader in a time of crisis.”

Also known by their NATO reporting name Severodvinsk class, the 13,800-ton Yasen-class attack boats are among the most capable submarines in the world. In particular, the three current boats in the class are capable of a special quiet operations mode that make them difficult to detect in the open ocean. In 2018, the lead boat in the class, Severodvinsk, evaded U.S. efforts to find it for weeks, according to press reports.

Navy officials have told USNI News that the service has become increasingly concerned with the efficacy of the Russian submarine force.

The growing ability of Russian submarines to operate undetected in the Atlantic pushed the Navy to reactivate U.S. 2nd Fleet and create a command for anti-submarine warfare across the Atlantic in 2018.

The Russian Navy has planned to build ten Yasen-class attack boats, with the fourth to commission later this year, according to Russian press reports.

Medvedev further ratchets up the rhetoric:

Dmitry Medvedev, the 57-year-old deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council chaired by Putin, said in video remarks to reporters that Russia’s relations with the West have hit an all-time low.

Asked whether the threat of a nuclear conflict has eased, Medvedev responded: “No, it hasn’t decreased, it has grown. Every day when they provide Ukraine with foreign weapons brings the nuclear apocalypse closer.”

 

Russia can still count China among its friends. What is each side getting from it? China procures energy from Russia, and Russia pockets cash:

Russia will increasingly be a commodities warehouse for China as Moscow grows more economically dependent on Beijing, a source close to the Kremlin told the Financial Times.

That unequal partnership was on display this week as Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, marking their first summit since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

After Putin launched his war, the West largely cut off Russia from the global financial system and shunned its energy exports, forcing it to reroute its oil and gas to China and India.

Indeed, Chinese purchases of Russian energy jumped 54% to $81.3 billion last year, accounting for 40% of the Kremlin's budget revenue. And in January, Russia exported 2.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China, becoming its top supplier, according to data cited by the FT.

"The logic of events dictates that we fully become a Chinese resource colony," the source told the FT. "Our servers will be from Huawei. We will be China's major suppliers of everything. They will get gas from Power of Siberia. By the end of 2023, the yuan will be our main trade currency."

Russia sees its economic ties with China as the key to winning the war in Ukraine, the source said, adding that Beijing is crucial to weathering Western sanctions while Russian natural resources help lock in China's support.

Because Xi has laid diplomatic groundwork, China can still court Europe while allying itself with Russia:

Part of Xi’s calculation, sadly, is that he can get away with his support for Russia without losing European trade. Europe humiliates itself by kowtowing to Beijing despite its insouciant support for Putin’s hostilities on the EU’s eastern doorstep. The actions of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron make this abundantly clear. Visiting China last November with German car manufacturer executives, Beijing's Global Times newspaper saluted Scholz. It observed that the chancellor's "pragmatic approach will surely bring [German businesses] more dividends of China's development, which will help them get a head start in competition with other foreign investors in China."

Russia is handy for China with regard to hegemonic designs in the Pacific, too:

As the People's Republic of China approaches its 100th anniversary in 2049, the existence of Taiwan will transition from being a bleeding stain on the CCP's credibility to that of an arterial hemorrhage. Xi has told his People's Liberation Army to be ready to seize the island nation by 2027. The Russian alliance helps significantly in this plan. 

Russia now regularly deploys its navy alongside China’s in exercises around Japan. These displays of raw military power allow China to put pressure on the U.S. and its allies while also presenting China's aggressive intentions toward Taiwan as having multilateral support. While the Russian navy struggles with maintenance and readiness, it has experienced crews in command of advanced weapons systems, especially its submarines, which are highly competent and capable of evading even the U.S. and British forces.

Russia having opted to ensnare itself with an invasion of Ukraine, China is able to play the architect of a new, multipolar world-stage arrangement, as exemplified by its role as broker of re-established ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

That move really served notice that China doesn't accept a US leadership role in the Mideast:

China has been pushing to challenge the U.S. role as the world’s superpower for years, and their success in securing the agreement weakens the U.S. position in the region. 

The United States has had longstanding but recently tense relations with Saudi Arabia, especially since the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who criticized the Saudi regime. U.S. intelligence assessed in 2021 that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to kill or capture Khashoggi. 

The U.S. has had fraught relations with Iran for decades since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, making it likely impossible for the U.S. to arrange such a deal between the two Middle Eastern powers. 

China has meanwhile bought substantial amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia and stayed close to Iran. 

Some international affairs experts have said the agreement signals China is getting more involved in diplomatic engagement of the Middle East. 

“It should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you’ll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative for the Atlantic Council, in a Friday analysis. 

And Xi even felt emboldened to send a reminder to Putin which country is the alpha dog in their alliance right after their summit:

China's leader, Xi Jinping, has called a meeting of former-Soviet Central Asian countries, in an audacious power play in Russia's backyard the week of his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Xi invited the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the first China-Central Asia summit on Wednesday, the AFP news agency reported. It remains unclear whether Turkmenistan has been invited.

The states are all former members of the Soviet Union, and Moscow has long regarded them as being in its sphere of influence after the Russian Empire conquered them in the 19th century.

So these two expansionist rogue states understand each other, shall we say. Whether their alliance would withstand any real stress tests or hair-raising near-mishaps better than a Five Families agreement remains to be seen.

But they, and the rogue states within their collective orbit, such as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Nicaragua, harbor no love for the rest of the world's notion of a stable and productive world order. They're driven by an entirely different set of values. 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday roundup

 Amanda Knox offers some rather hard-won insights in a piece at The Free Press entitled "The Life I Refused To Surrender." Knox, you may recall, was the American living in Italy circa 2009 who was wrongly convicted of murdering her British roommate. After she was incarcerated, forensic evidence showed that her roommate had been raped as well, and that one person committed both crimes. Knox was exonerated and released in 2011, returned to the United States, and is now a writer, wife and mother. 

Here's the life lesson she took from her prison experience:

The next day, back in the prison—the word colpevole, guilty, echoing in my head—I silently swept a corridor during my work shift. I overheard one guard say to another: Poor thing. She doesn’t understand what just happened.They thought, since I wasn’t hysterically sobbing, that I hadn’t absorbed the fact that I was going to spend the next 26 years trapped in this place. 

I was quiet precisely because I was sitting with my epiphany. And it was this: I was not, as I had assumed for the past two years, waiting to get my life back. I was not a lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home. 

I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me. 

The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It just was. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of clarity: my life was sad. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. I would be locked away for the best years of my life. I would never fall in love, have children, pursue a career. My world would be so small, trapped within concrete walls and surrounded by traumatized people, many of whom were a danger to themselves and others. This life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would alienate me from everyone I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in different directions. 

But—and this was the critical thing, the thing I hadn’t been able to see until that moment—no matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now. 

Every Friday, one of my Ordinary Times colleagues, Ben Sears posts an installment of his "POETS Day!" series. It's - well, I'll let Ben frame it:

This is one of those weekends where POETS Day gets lost in the wash. The first week of March Madness is a triumph of unproductivity. It’s not that the NCAA Tournament is so compelling that even non-basketball fans get into the excitement. It’s that basketball fans get so excited by it that they think it perfectly natural that people who don’t otherwise like the game would suddenly get swept up by the spectacle and those who don’t care realize that by pretending to care as much as basketball fans think they should they get to half ass it at work, take long lunches, use the copy machine to print endless personal documents, call their friends whenever they feel the urge, watch T.V. (television) on their phones at their desk, openly gamble, and leave early to catch the late afternoon game just like everyone else. Their bracket, chosen solely on the basis of which mascot is cuter, is just as likely as the fans’ to win a couple of hundred bucks too. So go do whatever. I don’t even think you have to ask to leave early. Go take a nap, hike a bit, marvel at how uncrowded places without walls of televisions are. Just be ready to talk about a blown call or an amazing comeback in one of the games you were supposedly watching. People will put the important-for-conversation clips on Twitter. As always, don’t let the weekend go by without a little verse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… even if everybody pissed off before Thursday’s tip off. If the basketball thing doesn’t spring you, there’s always St. Patrick’s Day to fall back on. Erin Roll Tide!

His featured poet last week was Delmore Schwartz, one of the earliest figures among what we call the New York Intellectuals. He was a classic case of an artistic powerhouse who couldn't tame his demons:

When Delmore Schwartz was twenty-five years old, he made a huge splash in New York intellectual circles with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The book, a collection of short stories and poems, was well spoken of by two of the time’s giants in Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He was fresh and talented and people predicted a great deal from him, which he delivered for a while. When he died, it was three days before anyone identified the body. Friends said they hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Alcohol, drug addiction, and insanity wore him down.

Among the themes he returns to in his work is lack of permanence and the passing of time, especially that things pass because they belong to time. His early life was not a happy one. His parents’, both Romanian Jewish immigrants, marriage was miserable. They split up when he was nine. His father died at age forty-nine when Schwartz was sixteen or seventeen. His most famous short story, the titular story from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, is a fantasy where the protagonist watches his parents’ early life on screen at a movie theater and yells at them to change course. It’s a past that can’t be changed, and the watcher is dragged screaming from the theater. So much of his work focuses on coming to terms with what is done; that a moment is formed and gone and can never be relived.

In his poem “Father and Son” in a dialogue the father tells his son that time is death as it “dribbles from you, drop by drop.” while the son is skeptical. “But I thought time was full of promises.” The father warns the son that he will, as many do, try on guises to hide from his past and its wear on him, but it won’t work. In one of my favorite images he takes the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth and immortality, and recasts it as a prison that burns away your ability to affect your past and leaves you impotent and guilt ridden at each inescapable return:

Always the same self from the ashes of sleep
Returns with its memories, always, always,
The phoenix with eight hundred memories!

 

Bridget Ryder of The European Conservative says that EU do-gooder collectivism aimed at the continent's ag sector is running into resistance. Isn't this the kind of pie-in-the-sky heavy-handedness that resulted in so much tumult in Sri Lanka recently?

While the EU has moved forward with its plan to abolish the combustion engine, another flagship aspect of the Green Deal—agriculture and food policy—is proving almost impossible to implement. 

The Commission released the Farm to Fork strategy in 2020, proposing some 30 measures to transform both agricultural practices and consumer food habits. It looks to tighten animal welfare standards, triple organic agriculture, reduce pesticide use and fertiliser runoff by 50%, and create standardised consumer food labelling to nudge Europeans’ eating habits away from fats, salt, and sugar, towards more ‘sustainable’ nutrition.

But it is meeting resistance from both member states and industry. Even EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who has always been sceptical of the plan, recently downplayed its importance.

“The Green Deal is not a law,” Wojciechowski told the Polish Parliament in December 2022. “It is a political program in which all sorts of objectives are included, and which, as is the case with political programs, will be implemented to a greater or lesser extent.”

Indeed, the Commission initially emphasised that the strategy largely consists of aspirational targets. But the EU Parliament’s resolution supporting the strategy called for giving them a “binding nature,” in other words, moving from aspirations to law. In June 2022, the commission proposed a revamp of the bloc’s pesticide rules that includes binding targets to reduce pesticide use in member states. 

Gotta love that binding nature. 

Patterico argues that much in life is situational, that positions such as "tribalism is always bad," or "experts generally can't be trusted" don't hold up as absolutes:

I’ll summarize my conclusion briefly: life involves judgment calls. It’s tempting to place all your faith in principles like opposing tribalism, or sticking with the group no matter what, or seeking commentary that challenges you, or seeking commentary that reinforces your beliefs. But there is a time and place for all of our decisions, and they can’t always follow such simple rules. The only correct principle is to develop a world view about how you know when you are doing the right thing, and then try to do it. There is no easy shorthand for that.

At Discourse, Robert Tracinski makes the case that in the early 20th century, a critical mass of cultural influencers embodied outspokenness and decidedly nonconformist, somewhat brazen persona combined with a ringing defense of the free market, a combination one doesn't see much anymore. 

Aaron Renn offers an even-handed take on the state of the complimentarian-egalitarian divide in institutional Christianity. 

I've been prolific over at Precipice.

My February 16 piece, "Art and Dissolution," looks at what a healthy way to reconcile towering creative figures' indispensable works with their lives of largely self-imposed chaos might look like. 

"Humankind Didn't Spring Forth Two Weeks Ago" takes on a common assumption upon which all too many post-Americans operate. 

"The Philippians 4:8 Standard" asserts that Paul's exhortation ought to be our gauge on what deserves our attention.

"Notes on the Definition of 'Woke'" is my contribution to the latest round of discussion about that term.

 

 

DeSantis's Ukraine remarks, Republican response and the blurred lines between phoniness and sincerity

 By now, you're aware of what the Florida governor said:

"While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Community Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them," DeSantis said in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

A territorial dispute. Interesting way to frame it, to say the least.

A number of prominent Republicans seized the opportunity to seize the moral high ground - or something that they hope voters will see as a reasonable facsimile.

Let's start with the reaction of the one Republican addressing this whom we can be confident is driven by principle:

“The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom,” the former lawmaker said in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday. “Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”

Cheney, who was known as a defense hawk during her time in Congress, said the stance by DeSantis showed “weakness.”

“Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon,” Cheney said. “Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”

Nikki Haley, who irreparably damaged her cred with the early 2021 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and who is now a declared presidential candidate, exudes the vibe of a politician striving to straddle in her response:

“President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him—first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” Haley said in a statement. “I have a different style than President Trump, and while I agree with him on most policies, I do not on those.”

In her own response to the Fox News questionnaire, Haley offered an unequivocal “Yes,” when asked if defending Ukraine was in America’s vital interests.

“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory,” Haley said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”

John Cornyn, the Texas Senator who serves as the grownup foil to his colleague with the same position, speaks pretty plainly about it:

“I’m disturbed by it. I think he’s a smart guy,” Cornyn told Politico. “I want to find out more about it, but I hope he feels like he doesn’t need to take that Tucker Carlson line to be competitive in the primary. It’s important for us to continue to support Ukrainians for our own security.”

As sentiment from some in his party has soured on the war, Cornyn has been one of the leading conservative voices in the Senate continuing to voice the need for U.S. support.

“The point that keeps getting lost in this war is that a Ukrainian victory is in our national interest,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor last month. “The most effective way to keep American troops out of the line of fire is to help the Ukrainians stop Putin now, before his conquest moves even further west.”

Marco Rubio rightly zeroed in on the "territorial dispute" characterization.

Thom Tillis emphasized the humanitarian-crisis aspect.  

This dustup will deepen the fissure between MAGA world and, well, pretty much the rest of the country. Everybody who is not eyeball-deep in Kool-Aid can see what the drop-Ukraine-like-a-hot-potato position for what it is. Yes, Ukraine has dealt with corruption issues since the fall of the USSR. Nations are comprised of fallen human beings, and every last one of them has ever-present challenges as a result. But from 1991 to 2014, the world understood the parameters of Ukraine's sovereignty. Putin has acted in utter disregard for that understanding since then. A reliably stable global order is what's at stake here.

Is DeSantis flaming out already?

Probably too early to say decisively, but it's heartening to see the short-term damage it's doing to his national standing. But we surely have many more plot twists to witness before determining whether it is a corrective moment or a fatal one. 

 

 

Donald Trump is not, and never has been, a conservative

 Consider what he had to say about a couple of particular topics in Iowa:

Former President Donald Trump drew contrasts between himself and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday in Davenport, Trump’s first visit to Iowa since announcing a run for president. 

Speaking to a full Adler Theatre, Trump called his potential rival “very, very bad on ethanol,” compared him to 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney, and accused DeSantis of supporting raising the minimum age for Social Security benefits.

During his 2012 campaign for Congress, DeSantis expressed support for restructuring Social Security and Medicare, which aid millions of seniors in the United States, to make them more financially sustainable.

While in Congress, DeSantis voted on nonbinding budget resolutions that called for raising the retirement age and slowing the growth of future spending.

This bit of ethanol pandering is classic Trump transactionalism. He knows that the subsidies are federal gravy for Iowa corn producers and framing it as sacrosanct just may buy their loyalty, the only thing the Very Stable Genius gives a flying diddly about in this universe. 

It also makes clear that Trumpism is not about the free market, or, if you want to put it in macro terms, an allocation of resources that is in any way efficient:

One of the key reasons for the growth in ethanol production has been government subsidies for ethanol — $45 billion in tax credits giving 45 cents to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced between 1980 and 2011. This was a strange subsidy considering ethanol's inefficiency as a fuel, and given the fact that unlike other renewables, burning ethanol continues to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It's not like the farmers growing subsidized corn for ethanol production didn't already have a market for their produce. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones calls it "shoveling... ag welfare to a group of people who were already pretty rich."

In January 2012, the legislation that authorized the ethanol tax credits expired. But this didn't end the subsidies for ethanol. Why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let the tax credits expire? According to Aaron Smith of the American Enterprise Institute:

The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.

The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars. The ethanol mandate is causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, creating a vulnerable market in which even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world's poor.[AEI]

So the ethanol subsidies are still alive through government-guaranteed demand from the Renewable Fuel Standard mandate.

There are so many curbs on human freedom involved here: a mandate, government playing favorites, wealth redistribution.

The other topic on which he pulled the I'll-never-change-one-thing-about-this-government-goodie was Social Security. We covered this last month at LITD, excerpting generously from a piece by Tiana Lowe. We'll just re-up the relevant portion of that:

 I want to discuss a Washington Examiner piece by Tiana Lowe that deserves wide readership. It's short, and it's some bracing straight talk about that perennial third rail: Social Security.

She starts by recounting what President Biden had to say about it last night:

"So tonight, let’s all agree to stand up for seniors," Biden said. "Stand up and show them we will not cut Social Security. We will not cut Medicare. Those benefits belong to the American people. They earned them. If anyone tries to cut Social Security, I will stop them. And if anyone tries to cut Medicare, I will stop them."

Lowe point out that this is a lot of sound and fury over something that ain't even happening:

But not only is Biden arguing against a straw man here — sadly, no sitting Republicans actually are pledging to cut entitlements — but he is also forgetting that doing nothing is tantamount to a massive cut of Social Security benefits!

Why is that the case?

Absent a major reform from Social Security, the program will become insolvent in a little more than a decade. Upon insolvency, benefits will be slashed by 20% to 25% across the board.

Okay, nobody is talking about cutting benefits or structurally reforming the program. Well, where do we look next to face our country's debt-and-deficit precipice?

If Republicans wish to balance the budget within the decade without touching entitlements or defense spending, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects Congress would need to slash 85% of the rest of the budget.

Could tax hikes fill in the void of the Social Security Trust Fund once insolvency hits? Maybe — if Democrats and Republicans were comfortable with jacking up the payroll tax by 25%.

And then there's what the VSG had to say on Truth Social about one of America's thorniest foreign-policy problems:

“Kim Jung Un of North Korea, who I got to know and got along with very well during my years as President, is not happy with the U.S. and South Korea doing big training and air exercises together,” Mr Trump said. “He feels threatened. Even I would constantly complain that South Korea pays us very little to do these extremely expensive and provocative drills. It’s really ridiculous. We have 35,000 in jeopardy soldiers there, I had a deal for full payment to us, $Billions, and Biden gave it away. Such a shame!!!”

Folks to the right of center finding appeasement of totalitarian belligerents loathsome has Cold War roots, but it's still found fairly recent expression. Barack Obama deservedly came in for outrage for his apology tour, accepting a Loan Chomsky book from Hugo Chavez in front of the world's cameras, and pursuing a worthless agreement with Iran about its nuclear program.

But the VSG speaks in terms about Kim suggesting maybe they ought to get a room, and the drool-besotted cult is fine with it. 

And there's the transactional element again. These allies, they need to pony up! We're putting a lot of young US asses on the line over there!

No, his culture-war nods, delivered in the most boneheaded manner possible, do not make up for stuff like this.

Still, most Republicans want him to be the 2024 presidential candidate. 

That's sick. 

 

Tucker Carlson and the larger question of how formerly distinguished, principled people became drool-besotted MAGA firebrands

 Mike Grillo has a piece at Ordinary Times today looking at the Tucker phenomenon. He gives a brief overview of the impressive way Carlson started his career:

My first experience with Tucker Carlson came about in 1995, when he was a staff writer at the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine. Carlson, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, and others were, like me, Generation X conservatives who brought a freshness to political commentary and debate seen through the eyes of people under the age of 30.

Carlson wrote for a wide variety of publications including New York Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and more. He wrote an essay for Esquire detailing his trip to Liberia with Al Sharpton that later received a nomination at the National Magazine Awards.

Grillo leaps over the decades to look at what Carlson has become:

Fast forward to 2023, and that Tucker Carlson is gone. People often change their political views. It is not unnatural. I know people who were far more conservative than I was at 25 who are now card-carrying Democrats and vice versa. It happens. Tucker admitted his views had changed, going from a Reagan-like conservative to a much more nationalist conservative in the vein of Josh Hawley and JD Vance (who underwent the same metamorphism as Carlson, but in a scant 3-4 years). There is nothing wrong with that at all.

I don't know that I'd agree that "there is nothing wrong with that at all." I suppose that in a people-will-do-what-they-will kind of context, one can't be overly disappointed to see these transformations, but there's the matter of some of us standing for something we've stood for since we formulated our overarching worldviews. In that sense, Carlson, Vance, Hawley, and some people I'm going to mention soon took decidedly wrong turns.

Grillo's next conclusion seems to be a bit too easy to reach, it seems to me:

However, Carlson fell victim to what so many people did in the Trump era — he became a slave to ratings as many digital publications became slaves to website traffic (see The Federalist). In doing so, Carlson became what he decried in his 2003 book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites. In the book, he described how he had respect for ideologues, but couldn’t stand partisans. Why? Because the latter adhered to whatever position was most beneficial to themselves personally, and not what they believed.

But then again, I suppose I must consider Rupert Murdoch's oh-hell-yes-we-were-motivated-by-ratings Dominion Voting Systems deposition.

Grillo also mentions The Federalist in that paragraph, ascribing opportunism as the motive. A 2017 piece by Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast fleshes the devolution out more throughly, mentioning that, at that point, one could still find some actually interesting writing there:

The Federalist isn’t monolithic, and there are still articles about topics like “localism,” hot takes about women’ leggings, and essays on, say, G.K. Chesterton, but the website’s anti-anti-Trump emphasis (the things that get buzz) concerned almost everyone I spoke to.

But concern among staff writers was growing (BTW, so much water has gone over the dam in the intervening years, I'd forgotten that Tom Nichols used to write for The Federalist): 

At least one writer at The Federalist is concerned about the site’s general direction. Tom Nichols, a senior contributor at The Federalist, professor at the Naval War College, and author of The Death of Expertise, told me “I think some of it goes too far. I don't like the drumbeat of terms like ‘fake news,’ and I particularly didn't like the attacks on Comey, which really do come across, at least to me, as looking like just so much water-carrying for Trump.”

Lewis, and some people he quotes, are reluctant to pin the anti-anti-Trump movement on any specific hard-and-fast-motive:

There are organic and benign explanations about how an evolution like this takes place, along with less noble theories being bandied about. “The anti-anti-Trump position is a safe one,” says Mediaite columnist and conservative talk show host John Ziegler, “because you're giving the Trump cult what they want while you're also trying to pretend you're standing on some sort of principle.”

“The shift is unmistakable, but is it designed to appease funders or advertisers, or simply the organic outcome of changing times and writers' evolving positions,” asked writer and Rochester, N.Y. radio host Evan Dawson. “When you see smart people who you've respected for a long time going down a strange road, it's easy to allow yourself to ascribe nefarious motives… is it about money? Is it something we're not seeing? But I don't necessarily want to fall victim to that. I just don't understand it, and it's disappointing.” 

I'm going to do something here that requires me to proceed carefully: ascribing in good faith some reasonable motives to conservatives who have become Trumpists over the past eight years.

Perhaps the figure who best articulates how frustration boiled over into zeal for an unforeseen way of moving forward is Kurt Schlichter. I won't be quoting directly, so loathsome and spiritually grotesque do I find him. But he has repeatedly made a point over the years that bears paying heed to. The conservative movement - its magazines, think tanks and elected politicians - had not really moved the needle, despite a few legislative gains. Schlichter would mock the cruises and conferences as the time-wasters of effete dweebs who had no fire in the belly. 

Harsh, yes, and expressed with too broad a brush, I'd say. He's spot on when it comes to, say, Bill Kristol, who has been reduced to exhorting people to vote Democrat, but he goes after some people who are unmistakably noble and doing important work, such as David French.

But it's true that the arc of American life has not bent toward something favorable to conservatives over the last 50 years, and the conservative movement has not mounted an effective countervailing force.

And then comes this loudmouth, sharp-elbowed New York developer, brand hustler and all-around character who, while having a track record making clear he doesn't have any core principles, has learned enough of the righty lexicon to generate excitement among the frustrated. Many folks saw it as a game-changer.

One element of the conservative movement that evolved differently from the above mentioned think-tank-and-magazine milieu was broadcast punditry - talk radio and Fox News.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, basically pioneered the modern talk-radio model. When he appeared on the scene in the late 1980s, pretty much every kind of conservatism found it an exciting development. But some hindsight has made clear that, from the outset, he dealt in provocative-as-hell-and-proud-of-it bombast. Exhilarating for a time, but not the kind of long-term arrow in the quiver that was going to get the conservative vision over the progressive hurdle.

It's worth noting that neither Limbaugh nor the next talk-radio superstar, Sean Hannity, finished college. A college degree, of course, doesn't instantly confer depth cred to someone - and can even work in the opposite direction. But they established a prototype, the figure who may not be steeped in highbrow theory but knows in his gut that the country is on the wrong track.

Fox News lived up to its fair-and-balanced tagline pretty well for a number of years, but retrospect shows us that there were problems of a moral nature from the start. Founder Roger Ailes was shown to be a sexually exploitative boss, telling Andrea Tantaros to turn around in his office so he could see her jiggle, and telling Julie Roginsky "We'd both get in so much trouble if I took you out for a drink." He'd been kicked out of the organization in disgrace shortly before he died, but he'd set in motion a pattern that made possible the crash-and-burn stints at the network of Eric Bolling, Ed Henry, Kimberly Guilfoyle and other horndogs. As time went on, the opinion side of Fox became more concentrated on facilitating political wins. The matter of what makes for a noble human being, once a core concern of the responsible Right, fell off the radar.

I think that basically what happened to Tucker Carlson is that he became a big star at Fox News. It became quite intoxicating, after having tossed the base a few chunks of red meat, to have that base deify him. Once the pleasure center in his brain had gotten a taste of that, he was off and running.

How about those on the more elevated level, those of whom we can truly say that they are intellectuals? Here I'm speaking of Roger Kimball, Bill Bennett, Victor Davis Hanson, to name a few.

I think they basically let the above-mentioned frustration become the exclusive driver of the work they've done since the Very Stable Genius strode onto the scene. Frustration, something all of us experience momentarily, is unproductive when it takes one's viewpoint over completely.

Now, I'm done with the ascribing-in-good-faith-some-reasonable-motives-to-conservatives-who-have -become-Trumpists portion of this post.

What's inexcusable, for all Trumpist and Neo-Trumpist types, from the radio barkers to the intellectuals to the performance clowns in elected office, is the perpetuation of lies that their stance has forced them into. They expend much of their energy trying to persuade us that the 2020 election was rigged, that January 6 was no big deal, and, most harmfully, that Donald Trump had redeeming qualities.

Truth, like the above-mentioned matter of what makes a noble human being, is a core value of actual conservatism.

These people are something other than conservatives, and their phoniness and nastiness just may be making it easier to make that case.

 

I'd love to see Jennifer Rumsey and Steven Koonin sit down for a conversation about net zero

 Cummins, Inc. which characterizes itself as a "leader in global power technology," had been teasing the public for weeks, in the form of Facebook posts and highway billboards, with a major development the company intended to unveil on March 8.

This being the 9th, we now know what the development was. We now know that it is 

the launch of Accelera by Cummins, a new brand for its New Power business unit. Accelera provides a diverse portfolio of zero-emissions solutions for many of the world’s most vital industries empowering customers to accelerate their transition to a sustainable future. 

The launch of Accelera is a significant step forward in Cummins’ efforts to achieve its Destination Zero strategy, focused on evolving Cummins technologies to reach zero emissions across its product portfolio. Cummins’ Destination Zero strategy is rooted in the understanding that multiple solutions are required to achieve industry-wide decarbonization across the diverse applications the company powers. Over the past several years, Cummins has invested more than $1.5 billion in research and technology, capital and acquisitions to build Accelera’s leadership and technological capabilities. Accelera is now a global leader in zero-emissions technologies, providing battery electric and fuel cell electric solutions across commercial and industrial applications with hundreds of electrolyzers generating hydrogen around the world today. 

“Achieving our goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires leveraging our entire portfolio of businesses,” said Jennifer Rumsey, Cummins President and Chief Executive Officer. “As we have continued to lead in and advance the engine-based solutions that power our customers’ businesses, we have also built the broadest combination of zero-emissions technologies dedicated to the commercial vehicle industry like battery electric and fuel cell electric powertrain solutions and electrolyzers for green hydrogen production. Establishing Accelera reinforces our commitment to leading in zero-emissions solutions and highlights our unmatched ability to leverage our deep understanding of our customers’ needs and applications, technical expertise and extensive service and support network to walk hand in hand with our customers throughout the energy transition.” 

Accelera is advancing a range of zero-emissions solutions, including hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, e-axles, traction systems and electrolyzers, to sustainably power a variety of industries from commercial transportation to chemical production. Both a components supplier and integrator, Accelera is decarbonizing applications like buses, trucks, trains, construction equipment, stationary power and carbon intense industrial processes. 

Now, Cummins employs some of the best and brightest, and has some notable concrete efforts to show for its net-zero zeal:

Recent zero-emissions highlights that Accelera will continue to build on include:

• Completing the acquisition of Meritor, Inc., and Siemens Commercial Vehicle business to advance electric powertrain solutions 
• Increasing global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity with gigawatt-scalable plants in Fridley, Minnesota – its first in the United States – and in Spain (now under construction)
• Powering the world’s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer in  operation in the world in Bécancour, Canada
• Powering the world’s first hydrogen refueling station for ships, cars, trucks and industrial customers in Antwerp, Belgium
• Powering the world’s first megawatt-scale demonstration plant for storing wind energy in the natural gas grid in Windgas Falkenhagen, Germany
• Powering the world’s first fleets of hydrogen fuel cell passenger trains in Germany
• Deploying four hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered class 8 heavy-duty trucks with several marquis fleet customers in the United States
• Powering 52 fuel cell city buses in Lingang, Shanghai
• Powering refuse trucks with FAUN across Europe

Impressive stuff. But theoretical physicist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Koonin, in an interview with Genn Loury, casts doubt on whether such measures are going to be adequate to Cummins's vision:

Now, what about the Paris Accords, the possibility of international diplomacy being able to get the Chinese and the Indians and the Europeans and the North Americans all on the same page on this? I mean, particularly in light of what you just observed about the fact that most of humanity has yet to fully empower itself to enjoy the benefits of the modern technological civilization that we take for granted, which depends on fossil fuels.

Ain't gonna happen, all right? We're not gonna reduce, we're not gonna go to zero certainly by 2050. Even John Kerry admits that now. And we're not gonna go to zero globally certainly before the end of this century.

Oh, excuse me. Can you just explain to people what “go to zero” means?

Okay, so the world emits a certain amount of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, every year. Most of that emission is due to the burning of fossil fuels. Because the world is developing and the population is increasing, the amount of fossil fuels we burn every year goes up, has been going up at about one-and-a-half percent a year. In order to stabilize—not reduce but just stabilize—human influences on those emissions have to go to zero. If you want to stabilize the climate, allegedly, at one-and-a-half degrees temperature rise, it needs to go to zero by 2050. If you go to zero more slowly, the temperature will be higher, they say. 

So the goal, the political goal, the goal of the Paris Accord is to get to zero some time in the latter half of this century, globally. That means no emissions of fossil fuels used in the conventional way. Also, by the way, you gotta fix agriculture, which accounts for about 25% of emissions. But basically to get to an emissions-free world by 2050 or 2100. So that's kind of the goal. 

But if you look at the drivers, the development, the rate of change of technology, the somewhat modest increase in population expected over the next 80 years, there's just no way that's gonna happen. And you can understand that from the point of view of the Chinese or the Indian. Their overwhelming priority is to get enough energy for their people so that they can improve their lives. But the issue of, well, something might happen to the climate a hundred years from now is just not particularly important relative to that overwhelming need.

A whole lot of effort is being expended to address something that is not a crisis.

And there's a whole lot of the world that would like to enjoy the Western standard of living. Leapfrogging over the employment of the energy forms that made that standard of living possible isn't going to achieve that.

Cheap, dense and ready available energy is still the foremost kind. 

 

 

ESG, like all progressive virtue-signaling, is not achieving its purported aims

 Great piece by John Masko today at UnHerd. In the course of looking at where the ESG movement currently stands, he runs us through a synopsis of its history. It shows that the whole thing was cooked up to try to convince progressives that the corporate world was puking all over itself to get its mind right:

ESG first entered the investment and banking mainstream as a survival strategy. In 2009, BlackRock had acquired Barclay’s Global Investors Ltd, making it the largest investment firm in the world with almost $3 trillionin assets under management (AUM), a sum larger than the total revenue of the US federal treasury. Politically speaking, BlackRock’s emergence as an investment superpower could hardly have come at a worse time. Amid the wreckage of the 2008 Financial Crisis and then the ululations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, public suspicion of big banks and corporations was at an all-time high. Finance, in particular, became a morality play: financial institutions were the greedy villains, while policymakers played the heroic civic advocates reining them in. For BlackRock, the chances of continuing to grow freely in such a hostile policy climate seemed remote.

But BlackRock’s leaders had an epiphany — one that would repeat itself in the C-suites of several of its competitors in the early 2010s. What if big investment houses could rebrand themselves as so unimpeachably virtuous and civic-minded that their virtue outshone even their regulators themselves? Such a strategy would be game-changing. Not only would it afford investment houses a mile-wide road to limitless growth; it could even, if played judiciously, accord the companies themselves quasi-governmental power.

The ESG principles underpinning that strategy had already been written. The 2004 United Nations report “Who Cares Wins,” which introduced the principles of ESG to a worldwide audience, suggested that investors would make higher long-term profits if they put more emphasis on environmental and social progress. The small print was that the task of defining these impossibly broad categories (“environmental” or “social”) would be left to international institutions. Per those institutions’ priorities, “environmental” would mostly focus on implementing CO2-reduction goals, while “social” would mean anything related to the UN’s stated social goals on issues such as gender parity, racial justice, and poverty reduction. In other words, from the very beginning, the goal of ESG was to harmonise the priorities of political elites with those of business leaders. This approach was nothing new in Europe, where Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) had long blurred the lines between business and government. But in the US, where the WEF ethos had failed to take root and the shareholder remained king, it was a radical departure.

But when it did take off here, it really took off:

When the UN invited global financial institutions to sign onto the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2007, the total global assets managed by ESG-minded investing vehicles was around $10 trillion. By 2020, a mere 13 years later, that has grown to more than $30 trillion worldwide and more than $17 trillion in the US. New private equity firms and investment outfits devoted purely to ESG — such as Al Gore’s Generation Investment — were springing up every year, and most large US investment firms began offering ESG-mandated mutual funds, leading Bloomberg in 2021 to project $53 trillion invested in ESG by 2025.

This happened because individual owners of shares in companies had a smaller voice than ever:

As the ESG agenda took hold, the individual investor increasingly found himself shunted aside. Admittedly, the roots of this shift lay in the early Eighties, when federal proxy voting rules were changed to allow fund managers such as BlackRock to vote on behalf of their clients. The idea was a good one at the time, in that it recognised that few individual investors have the time to attend shareholder meetings or the wherewithal to make their views known to company leadership. But it handed vast power to investment companies — admittedly under the understanding that they would vote on behalf of their clients for one purpose only: the maximisation of profits and shareholder returns. It was, however, only a matter of time before this power was exploited.

BlackRock's Larry Fink has demonstrated jaw-dropping hubris for the past eight years:

Fink’s first few letters contained tell-tale signs of the revolution to come, particularly in 2015, when he chastised managers for returning too much money to their investors in dividends and buybacks. Then, in his 2018 letter, he went a step further, advocating that CEOs step away from traditional shareholder capitalism and toward ESG by embracing the idea of “stakeholders”. In his words: “Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.” “Every company,” he wrote, “must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Allow me to translate: On behalf of millions of shareholders I’ve never met, I declare that they no longer truly own the companies they have invested in. Society does.

With a three-fold result: investors not being on board, financial under-performance, and foot-dragging by corporations on compliance with Fink's edicts:

Over the past decade, as investment houses such as BlackRock have exerted ever-greater influence over decision-making at their portfolio companies, investors have in fact been signalling for them to take a step back. We can see this in the growing popularity of passive strategies (in which investment companies take a backseat role) compared with active strategies (in which they more frequently buy and sell stocks and actively intervene in the affairs of portfolio companies to improve performance). In 2011, 21% of US AUM were managed passively, compared with 79% managed actively; by 2018, the split had narrowed to 36% to 64%. Parity is projected for 2025. BlackRock’s own active-to-passive balance has followed a similar trajectory. Their portfolio had been primarily actively managed until 2009. But by 2018, $3.9 trillion of their $6 trillion assets were invested passively. Just as BlackRock’s customers were voting with their dollars for the firm to intervene less in company policy, BlackRock’s leaders were declaring it their sacred duty to intervene more.

Over the years, ESG advocates have parried charges of overreach by responding that investing with ESG criteria is just as lucrative as traditional investing. This has always been a dubious argument: after all, if favouring ESG-friendly companies were a prudent financial strategy, an investor would not need to publicly commit to ESG in order to do it; it would simply be the best financial decision.

The evidence of ESG’s performance has until recently been ambiguous enough to offer ammunition to both sides. But that has begun to change. In 2022, eight of the top ten actively managed US ESG funds (including one of BlackRock’s) performed worse than the S&P 500. This demonstrates two things. First, that ESG funds are not some financial miracle. And second, that the performance of ESG funds is tightly bound to the tech industry, which had a terrible year in 2022. (Unsurprisingly, tech stocks are overrepresented in ESG funds, since it is easier for tech companies to claim low environmental impact than companies that actually make things.)

Not only is ESG failing to make money, but it is not even achieving its non-financial goals. One sizeable Columbia University and London School of Economics study published in 2021 found that US companies in 147 ESG portfolios had worse compliance records for both labour and environmental rules than US companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labour or environmental regulations. This study added to a growing body of evidence that ESG investing is not only anti-democratic but ineffective.

Maybe the academic world, in which 52 percent of professors say that they're afraid to speak their minds and 11 percent say they've been disciplined for what they've taught in the classroom, could take a cue from the actual owners of American businesses.

There come a point at which the absurdity of the entire progressive project becomes so obvious that something has to move the needle.