We have to meet the noon train - thoughts on the latest Ukraine developments

 The radar screen of the average American citizen is a cacophonous thing. That's partly due to the round-the-clock nature of the modern news cycle. I'd wager, though, that deeper factors are at work.

Because information of a serious nature comes through the same screens that bring us the surfeit of distraction that perpetuates the outsized role amusement has in our lives, our capacity to prioritize various forms of screen content is diminished. We're ever more easily bored as well.

That's why, with Queen Elizabeth's passing, two major hurricanes, extravagant federal executive-branch promises to absolve us from our obligations, MAGA world antics, the commencing of the college and professional football seasons, and inflation's ravaging of our paychecks, it's understandable that Ukraine often gets moved off the front burner.

This is no time to be doing that. Russia's aggression toward Ukraine has brought us to an existential juncture.

Through nothing but brute force, Russia has, at least for the moment, changed the map of Europe:

Putin formally inked decrees declaring Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be Russian territory following a series of sham referendums.

The ruthless land grab was made official at the Georgievsky Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace in a signing ceremony.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the move "represents the most serious escalation since the start of the war" while the US said it would continue to provide Ukraine with more equipment.

Meanwhile, the US called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting where it's expected they'll announce a fresh wave of sanctions on Russia.

Toward the end of this week, Ukraine has announced that it will pursue an accelerated route to NATO membership. This is quite the tipping point, is it not? Earlier in this war, all parties kind of concurred that such a move was a ways off. Bringing Finland and Sweden into the fold made more sense, it was thought. 

But with the latest land grab, Kyiv no doubt felt the timeline had to be viewed differently.

Ukraine's application for NATO membership is no less fraught with danger than it's ever been. In fact, it's already been responded to with the starkest ultimatum of all:

Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, believes that Ukraine's accession to NATO will accelerate the outbreak of World War III.

Source: Medvedev, on Telegram

Quote: "Zelensky wants to join NATO as soon as possible. Great idea. Just begging the North Atlantic alliance to speed up the start of World War III."

Those inhabiting points along the spectrum of appeasement  advocating for a negotiated settlement - a spectrum that includes Trumpist yay-hoos as well as the elder statesman of the Realist school of foreign policy, Henry Kissinger -  probably feel that their position is bolstered. The stakes are now even higher than when they first began pronouncing in favor of appeasement. 

Wherever each of them is coming from, they tend to attempt persuasion with moral arguments - the continued high death counts on each side, the irreversibility of a decision to go to the nuclear level - but the fact is that theirs is an appallingly amoral position. 

Setting a precedent on the world stage that permits elbow room for evil is a dereliction of our highest duty. It's why the train scene in High Noon stirs us. It's why, when we encounter the C.S. Lewis quote informing us that “It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God,” we react with discomfort but know he's right.

We - and here I mean the entire West - must insist that the only acceptable resolution to this horrific situation is a full restoration of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders.

Putin may mock the notion of a rules-based order as an arbitrary invention meant to justify hegemonic behavior, but he's wrong. Most of the world knows it. That order is what has made to possible to bring force to bear when some entity exhibits real hegemonic behavior.

There will continue to be much on our plate, but it's essential that we grasp the gravity of the moment.

History is going to compel us to do hard things.

Giorgia Meloni's election as Italian PM - initial thoughts

 My current reaction is a mixture of encouragement and profound misgivings.

She was on fire in her acceptance speech and minced no words in calling out wokeness for the cultural cancer it is. I was mightily impressed that she quoted Chesterton toward the end (""Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible.")

Still, I find her problematic for reasons similar to those that add an element of wariness in the way I approach theologian Carl Truman. Like Truman, she has no use for the obliteration of the basic architecture of the universe into which progressivism has morphed. (By the way - and sorry for the slight digression - there is a fine essay on this subject, couched as look at the difference between equality and sameness, at Quillette this morning. It's by Bo Winegard, to whom I'll start paying more attention. Highly recommend it.)

But, as I am with Truman, I'm uncomfortable with some of the company she's kept over the years.

She's a go-getter, to be sure. At 15, she joined the Italian Social Movement's Youth Front. Now, the MSI had its roots in continued support for Mussolini's general program into the late 1940s, but she did go with the National Alliance when that formed and sought to distance itself from that fascist past. Her coziness with former PM Berlusconi bothers me, as does the addition of the tricolor flame, symbolizing Mussolini's remains, to the logo of her party Brothers of Italy.

But there was none of that in her acceptance speech. I suppose one reaction to that could be along the lines of "How politically savvy do you have to be to avoid any mention of your unsavory past ties in your acceptance speech?" and that's true. But I really do think her core passion is for restoring some basic common sense about matters of human sexuality and family - as well as a proper regard for the designer thereof.

She's yet another example of what bothers me about the populist drift of the Right throughout the West. A restoration of core values has gotten mixed with some impulses that I definitely can't abide by. As I've said many times before, this gives progressivism its opening to conflate it all and lump anyone who asserts basic facts about men, women and how they were designed to come together with nationalist bonehead-ism and flirtation with authoritarianism.

But the matter at hand for Meloni and whatever government she forms will be to keep Italy's debt under control and prepare for the energy crisis that will befall all of Europe this winter.

One can't help but wish her the best of luck on those fronts. On the cultural-issues front, we'll just have to see if, and to what extent, she's outgrown the excesses of her youth.

I'll just conclude with a link to Andrew T. Walker's Twitter thread about the matter. I'd particularly draw your attention to the third tweet:

Much of Twitter dot com is historians, sociologists, and pundits denouncing historic Christian claims about life, relations, and order as anti-democratic. So count me a little suspicious when cultural forces who hate Christianity invoke "far right" like a Pavlovian dog.

We can't deny her baggage, but we probably need to observe her in action in her new role for a bit to get the full story. 

The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

The special master to the Very Stable Genius's lawyers: we're not going to go off half-cocked on this

 Judge Dearie apparently intends to be a professional and have his ducks in a row:

 The senior federal judge tasked with reviewing the materials seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate sharply questioned the former president’s attorneys Tuesday during their first hearing before his courtroom.

Judge Raymond Dearie pushed Trump’s lawyers repeatedly for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence.

But Dearie bristled at the effort by Trump’s lawyers to resist his request for proof that Trump actually attempted to declassify any of the 100 documents that the Justice Department recovered from his estate. Without evidence from Trump, Dearie said his only basis to judge the classification level of the records was the fact that they all bear markings designating them as highly sensitive national security secrets — including some that indicate they contain intelligence derived from human sources and foreign intercepts.

The early tension between Dearie and Trump’s legal team was an ominous sign for the former president, who demanded the special master review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago and who proposed Dearie — a 1986 appointee of Ronald Reagan — to perform the task. Prosecutors had offered two other names, but acceded to Trump’s choice of Dearie.

The VSG's team is patently treading water. Any reasonable person is going to conclude that Dearie can't proceed with anything without proof.   

 

Thoughts on Russia's invasion of Ukraine at six months

 As is so often the case with events that jar the dynamics of the world stage, in March, when the missiles started to fly and major Ukrainian cities underwent horrific devastation, there was a general reaction in the West along the lines of, "Wasn't sure if the Kremlin was really going to do this, but it's now pretty clear they intend to be thorough about it."

That phase didn't actually last long. Russia skedaddled out of Kyiv, leaving behind scorched tanks that curious onlookers now examine. 

Ukraine has had a fraught history since regaining independent-nation status in 1991. Yes, there's been a fair amount of corruption and unrest. And upon the election of a comic actor (whose show about a high-school teacher who improbably becomes president is really quality television) as president, much of the world wondered if Ukraine was on a path of unseriousness. 

But there's no doubt now that he's proven his mettle. He's hands-on, patriotic, savvy and courageous. Whether that will translate to the chops required of a head of state once peace is concluded (hopefully by a decisive Ukrainian victory) remains to be seen. Let us recall that British voters removed Winston Churchill from 10 Downing Street mere months after he'd helped orchestrate an Allied victory in World War II.

Speculation that Western unity might give way to burnout has not been borne out. Consider the zeal with which Finland and Sweden wanted to join NATO, and Germany's interest in bolstering its military strength.

About that presumption of Russian thoroughness: Over the summer, that gave way to a "grinding war of attrition" narrative.

In the past two weeks, that view has required recalibration. Ukraine has demonstrated that it can pull off a stunning reversal, taking back 3,000 square miles of territory and reoccupying Izyum.  The difference in morale between Russian troops and Ukrainian troops is an enormous chasm.

What's going to be necessary for this turn of events to maintain momentum is Western aid: more HIMARS systems in particular.

And we're going to have to clench our jaws and steel our spines as Russian policy influencers continue to dish out the apocalyptic rhetoric.  Otherwise, the blackmail precedent becomes more entrenched and a stable world order continues to elude us.

A side-note-type observation: Since the invasion began, I've been impressed with how much Ukrainians love their animals. It was so gratifying to see refugees at train stations and in shelters carrying, along with some clothing and personal effects, pens containing their dogs and cats. Even now, there's time for a military vehicle to stop and scoot a recalcitrant hedgehog off the road before proceeding. 

I've come to have an affection for Ukraine's national character. They love things dear to my own heart: music, food, animals. As February gave way to March, they were just sitting there, sorting our their society's issues as all societies do, when they were subjected to unprovoked savagery of a scale not seen in Europe in over 70 years. 

Which is why it's nauseating to see the likes of J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson try to craft some kind of bandwagon onto which "national conservative" types are expected to climb. A who-cares-what's-going-on-in-Ukraine attitude requires an astounding level of willful ignorance about the stakes for a viable West as the 21st century nears conclusion of its first quarter.

It's to be expected, I guess, from their ilk, but it's dismaying in the extreme to see the Heritage Foundation, once one of America's most reliably three-pillar-conservative think tanks, getting on board to the extent that scholars are bailing over intolerance of their support for solidarity with Ukraine. 

My intuition tells me that such types aren't going to convince a critical mass of Americans to sign on to their nihilistic, cynical program. What's really going on is too clear to most of us.

There's substantive reason to harbor hope. What's called for is maintaining resolve. It's a cacophonous world, and the number of attention-worthy items that come across our radar screens is overwhelming. But on any given day of prioritizing it all, Ukraine ought to make the cut. Someday, God willing, they'll make a strong, confident and freedom-loving member of a West equipped for a challenging future. 

Different lipstick won't change the nature of the ESG pig

 Environmental, social and governance (ESG)  investing is a concept originally cooked up in 2005 at a UN conference. It's of a piece with the Great Reset initiative devised by the World Economic Forum in 2020, and which has newly crowned British King Charles III among its enthusiasts.

It's all very top-down and collectivist. Our pointy-headed betters have assessed the prospects for humankind and determined that it must be steered en masse into a course that is more "fair," "equitable," "green" and "sustainable."

A couple of months ago, I noted here at LITD how it is being used to circumvent government policy or court decisions that aren't to its proponents' liking:

 . . . now that the Supreme Court has said that the EPA overreached in trying to tell coal companies what kinds of products they could offer in the marketplace, those who want you to believe the global climate is in some kind of dire circumstance are going to use ESG as the next available weapon to assault our liberty:

Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.

“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.

What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”

You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you? 

The bad taste in the mouth where ESG is concerned has been spreading:

A number of sustainable investing champions say it’s time for the “ESG” label to be shelved and replaced by something less likely to draw attacks from both the political right and left.

Robert Eccles, a professor who’s spent the past 12 years researching sustainability at Harvard Business School and now University of Oxford’s Said Business School, says the term “just doesn’t have value anymore. Let’s change the conversation.” 

“I’m happy to not use the term ESG,” he said in an interview, referring to environmental, social and corporate governance issues. “People are so invested now in hating ESG for reasons that don’t really have much to do with ESG.”

It turns out that defining ESG with any kind of specificity is a lot harder than using the Milton Friedman gauge of a business's health: is it showing a return on owners' investment?

Industry veteran Sandra Carlisle, who’s head of sustainability at $58.6 billion Jupiter Asset Management, said ESG remains poorly defined and inadequately regulated, making it confusing for investors and companies to understand. It’s also left investors in the dark, just when they need more clarity, says Leslie Samuelrich, who’s spent a decade in sustainable investing and is president of Green Century Capital Management.

“It’s time for the industry to explain what ESG means and what it doesn’t mean, to maintain its credibility,” she said. Samuelrich, whose Boston-based firm oversees about $1 billion, says ESG is about using relevant material factors to measure how a company handles risks. “It isn’t ‘sustainable,’ ‘green’ or ‘making an impact.”’

Meanwhile, ESG continues to take up an ever bigger chunk of financial markets. McKinsey & Co. estimates that more than 90% of S&P 500 companies now publish ESG reports. And according to Bloomberg Intelligence, ESG will this year exceed $40 trillionworth of assets. The amount allocated to sustainable investment funds reached around $2.5 trillion at end of June, research firm Morningstar Inc. says. Such figures suggest ESG is too entrenched to simply switch off. 

Before we go any further down this rabbit hole, it behooves us to consider the current situations of three countries that went all in for ESG:

Sri Lanka was the poster child for ESG investment and has suffered the brunt of these principles. Their most recent prime minister just resigned in shame, following months of protests and unrest stemming from the country committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. 

 

Ghana also took the “E” prong too much to heart, with its government agreeing to raise $5 billion with international capital with Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. Now experiencing runaway inflation, largely due to these GSS bonds, the country is hoping to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

 

  The Netherlands similarly adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to boost ESG investment and is now experiencing one of the highest inflation rates in the European Union. This was precipitated by the Dutch government approving a multi-year $21 billion plan to sharply cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030 which requires one-third of farmers to kill off their herds and shut down indefinitely.

Much has been made of late about how progressivism has shifted from a focus on class struggle to identity politics militancy, but we should take heed of the fact that its tactics for imposing its aims remain those that James Burnham noted in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.  It was written at a time when totalitarianism was reaching fever pitch in Europe. However, a number of lefties in the West saw that herding humankind into the collectivist pen to bring about their secular vision of a harmonious world could be achieved by the creation of a revolving door through which corporate managers, government bureaucrats and ivory-tower visionaries would pass as they were needed in particular roles.

I might also add that this is yet another example of why post-America can't have nice things. The Trumpists have seized on the general public's realization that collectivist do-gooderism is a crock, and bastardized it into a lexicon of "globalist elites" and "taking care of our people" when their own prescription is nothing more than rank protectionism. Their vision of what ought to be is as vague as the progressives'.  Their strength as an influential force lies in in their ability to imbue serious public-policy and cultural matters with a yee-haw vibe and conjure images of pitchforks and torches.

The actual antidote is what it's always been: a free market informed by Judeo-Christian morality. 

But it is encouraging to see developments such as this backing away from ESG. 

Eventually, proven verities win out over bizarre schemes. It's often a twisted and rocky road to that point, and the story is never over, but it's reassuring to see that common sense isn't dead. 

 

Biden's soul-of-the-nation speech - initial thoughts

 He could have easily planted his feet on solid ground and stayed there. After all, he had an abundance of legitimization for his basic point to work with. Alas, he chose to engage in dirty pool instead.

It should have been a moment when he could look like he was doing the responsible thing. The MAGA movement has of late confirmed what has been obvious to some of us since the summer of 2015: that it is antithetical to the political and foundational framework of this nation. The figure at its center has shown himself to be completely off the rails with his insistence that either he be instantly reinstated as president a new election be held  and has shown that he's not even sharp enough not to give away the game when he mentions the classified documents being "in cartons" before FBI agents arranged them on the carpet for photographing. 

His drool-besotted leg-humpers have shown that no amount of outrageous behavior will motivate them to cut ties with him. Of course, there's the Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/4chan/Qanon level, but also pundits and politicians with a veneer of respectability that, while nearly impossibly thin, allows them to get published in venues such as The Federalist, American Greatness and Townhall and also hold high office in our nation's capitol. They have so convinced themselves - and apparently a majority of Republican voters - that they are the true stewards of the conservative mantle that attempts to point out the true lay of the land get crowded out on the public's radar screen.

Theirs is a shortsighted vision of what victory looks like. As I put it in a June piece over at Precipice entitled "In Pursuit of a Conservatism That's Not Spiritually Ugly," 

Trumpists think it’s possible to stomp every last human being who embraces collectivism, identity politics, climate alarmism or militant secularism to any degree into the dust and be done with them. 

That’s not only impossible, it’s an undesirable thing to aim for. 

Another tenet at the core of real conservatism is a belief in love that is rooted in a Judeo-Christian understanding of the purpose for which human beings were made. 

It comes down to the question of what conservatism is striving for. To couch it in terms of majorities in the legislative and executive branches of government, or eradication of DEI departments in the nation’s universities and corporations is to take a woefully shortsighted view of what it is we’re undertaking.

For one thing, assuming the kind of victory Trumpists envision were possible, what would they do with all the progressives they had stomped into the dust? These are people who have demonstrated fierce determination in pursuit of their vision, and they would not fade away quietly. We already see that with the ferocity with which they’r responding to the Dobbs decision.

We all have to live on the same planet and in the same country. We can't ignore the question of how we're going to do that.

But Biden came close to framing a mirror-opposite vision when he veered into a defense of the the progressive agenda, an addendum to his primary message that was not at all necessary:

Trump and the MAGA Republicans “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” he said. They “are determined to take this country backwards.”

“Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” he said, referencing the social issues that Democrats have looked to place front-and-center for voters this fall.

That's just plain dirty pool. Slimy, scumbag-level opportunism. Actual non-Trumpist conservatives generally put a transcendent order, a design to the universe that comes from a sovereign God, at the core of their worldview. Biden is here trying to conflate a thousands-of-years-old understanding of human sexuality and what a family is with authoritarianism and the stoking of violence. 

Then again, ol' Joe's style has always involved an ample share of opportunism.

So in a moment in which he had the chance to bring clarity to the present set of circumstances, he went instead for muddying the waters in the name of advancement of his political brand.

That seems to be all anybody knows in terms of making pronouncements these days. 

The transmission component: why California will have to continue relying on normal-people energy forms

 There's a must-read report at Real Clear Investigations this morning about California's push to rely entirely on play-like energy forms within a couple of decades. The state is building lots of solar and wind power capture infrastructure, but there is presently no way to translate that energy into usable electricity:

California's precariously out-of-date hybrid power grid can't handle the state's growing amounts of solar and wind energy coming online, with system managers already forcing repeated cutbacks in renewables and a continued reliance on conventional energy to keep the grid stable, according to state data.

The shortcomings of the transmission grid, which energy consultants in this bellwether state have warned about for years, raise the prospect that marquee products of the growing battery economy such as electric vehicles – "emission free" on the road – will be recharged mainly from traditional electricity-generating power plants: energy from fossil fuels, some of it from out of state.

Writ large, the transmission problem threatens the zero-carbon future envisioned by green advocates nationwide. “We’re headed toward duplicate systems whose only benefit is to permit the occasional use of ‘clean power,’” said Grant Ellis, an independent electrical engineering consultant in Texas.

So, to deal with it, California has just nixed - "curtailed" - production of that power:

 

So-called "curtailments" of renewable power have become much more frequent for the state’s blackout-prone power grid because the state hasn't constructed enough transmission lines, transformers, poles, and other infrastructure to keep up. The amount of renewable energy curtailed in California tripled between 2018 and 2021, according to operator statistics.

The two parties involved in seeking a way past the impasse can't agree on which of them should bear the cost of getting transmission up to speed with production. And government's solution? Getting in the middle of the discussion with free-market-distorting redistributionist measures:

Eric O’Shaughnessy, a renewable energy consultant who has worked with the federally funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, blames a stalemate between renewable energy providers and electric system operators over who will pay for any infrastructure buildout.

“The system operators say, ‘We need this huge investment, and you are going to have to pay it,’ and the solar developer believes everyone should pay,” O’Shaughnessy said. Then politics comes into play “and that project gets shelved.”

The government’s answer is more taxpayer funding for transmission, although it will take at least 10-15 years to develop a new project, according to the Transmission Agency of Northern California, a group of publicly owned utilities in the state.

There is also the inevitable bureaucratic doo-dah that the involved parties must contend with:

The messy process of connecting solar and wind plants to the grid is made more complicated by a maze of committees, panels, and lawyers that need to weigh in on the specifics of each project.

“If an energy company in California wants a transmission line, it has to go to a public utility to build it, and to the California Energy Commission and a bunch of other commissions,” said Rajat Deb of energy consultant LCG. “And the cities also have to approve in some cases, so it takes all that to get a transmission line. That’s a lot of hoopla you have to go through.”

So wind and solar plants sit idle for up to three years before getting approval to sell their products.

Going to throw this suggestion out there, with the understanding that the entire state of California may be too far gone for anyone to give it serious consideration: Eliminate the wind and solar stuff until such time as they demonstrate true viability in the marketplace. Just let providers of tried-and-true energy forms - the dense and readily available ones - power the cars, homes and general modern way of life directly. 

That would, of course, mean giving up on the fallacy that the global climate is in some kind of dire trouble.

As I say, probably too much of a leap for California, but that state can serve as an example of what not to do for the rest of the world.  

 

 

 

 

Student loan forgiveness - initial thoughts

 1.) I have to believe a court case over this will happen sooner rather than later. Biden has not offered even a  flimsy attempt at justifying a purely executive-branch move. Congress was completely sidelined.

2.) It encourages a shrugging-off-responsibility mindset throughout our society. Now that the precedent has been set, how long is it before progressive policy types start opining that car loans and home loans need forgiving? It erodes the principle at the heart of the free market: that an economic transaction occurs when two parties, a buyer and seller, agree on the value of the good or service to bee exchanged, and each understands the obligations he or she is undertaking.

3.) Why is college so expensive? Look at the rate of growth of administrative staff over the last 40 years compared to that of faculty. 

4.) Expect that trend to continue. Insitutions of higher learning, or whatever it is they're dispensing these days, have been given a green light.

Is DeSantis a viable alternative for conservatives who want to stay Republicans but can't stand Trump?

 It's a question getting kicked around a lot right now on Twitter. 

There aren't a lot of choices if one believes that the Republican Party has a future. Pence comes in third in polls about who Pubs want to see as the presidential nominee in 2024, but what, exactly, is his lane? If it comes down to a juxtaposition of him and DeSantis, he is easily framed as the straddler, oh so careful not to commit himself on hard cultural-issue questions, whereas DeSantis seems to like to face them squarely.

But, conversely, that's a big DeSantis problem. He seems willing to use the power of the state to counter forces that no conservative is pleased with. And courts are striking him down on it. Woke corporations are a disturbing feature of 2022 American life, but it's not government's purview to deal with it.

Two figures I consider indispensable voices of sound reasoning have both said that there's no reason to go running toward DeSantis at this early date:

"I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) told the New York Times. If DeSantis was nominated, she “would find it very difficult” to support him.

“A number of Republicans would be far, far better for the country and the GOP,” Never Trump commentator David French wrote in a Twitter thread on the “DeSantis discourse.” “So hopping on the DeSantis train simply to block Trump is *way* premature.”

But all of these considerations only matter of one feels certain that the GOP can get the Trumpist infection out of its veins over the next two or three election cycles. 

I don't. Consider DeSantis himself, for instance. He's been out campaigning for Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.  Instant disqualifier. Negates any compelling aspects of his resume.

Pence likewise loses the Never-Trumper-who's-determined-to-stay-Republican with this kind of spinelessness:

Pence prostituted his reputation for Christian piety to the most vile figure in the history of American presidential politics, a man who modeled the opposite of every virtue taught in Sunday school. Pence lent his credibility as a religious man to a villain, and gave permission to millions of self-styled Christians to vote for him. Pence’s pious conscience was remarkably quiescent when Trump encouraged his followers to rough up hecklers; when he bore false witness against Muslim Americans (falsely claiming that he saw them celebrating after 9/11); when he attempted to extort the president of Ukraine to lie about Joe Biden; when he separated asylum-seeking parents from their children; when he refused to condemn the tiki-torch Nazi wannabes in Charlottesville; when he elevated a series of kooks and conspiracists to high office; and when he insisted that the election had been stolen.

Pence was fine with all of it.

. . .  Worse than simply remaining silent, he played the toady with seemingly endless reserves of self-mortification, uttering cringeworthy encomia to Trump’s “broad-shouldered leadership” (a phrase he repeated at least 17 times), and audacious lies about matters big and small.

There was no bottom to Pence’s fawning. To please Trump, he called Joe Arpaio, a convicted criminal (pardoned by Trump) and thuggish abuser of power, a “tireless champion of the rule of law” and said he was “honored” by Arpaio’s presence at his speech. He claimed, preposterously, that Trump had performed magnificently in the face of the COVID pandemic: “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

When Pence traveled to Ireland on an official visit, he didn’t stay in Dublin, but traipsed140 miles west to stay at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, necessitating a 40 minute flight and hour-long drive each way. Must have been inconvenient, but then, if Trump had asked Pence to crawl both ways, he would doubtless have obliged.

Nikki Haley? Loved her as ambassador to the UN. But she was one of the first post-January 6  to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Instant disqualifier.

But here's the thing: It doesn't matter to the GOP what any Never-Trumper thinks anyway. Not the keep-the-party-together types or those like me who deem it hopeless. Republicans don't need us. 

The party chews up and spits out anyone who acts on principle, even those who tried as long as possible to allow for Trump's dominance of its direction, and maneuver within that framework. 

So is DeSantis a viable alternative?

Because of where I stand on the Republican Party's moral rot, I really don't find it a very interesting question.

In 2024, the GOP will put up somebody who is either a coward, a nut, or a sycophant, of some combination of the three. 

Doesn't bode any better for the country than whatever hot mess the Democrats come up with. 

Can't see that I have a horse in this race.

Kari Lake and the defiling of conservatism

 So in its recent primary for the governorship, the Arizona Republican Party (one of the most ate-up state organizations in the country) went with former Phoenix area television news anchor Kari Lake over attorney and development consultant Karrin Taylor Robson. Say what you will about Robson (during her campaign, she kept it zipped on the question of whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential campaign, typical of Republican spinelessness seen nationwide these days), at least she's a lifelong Republican. Lake, on the other hand, was all about Barack Obama during that era.

But Lake is now the general-election candidate, so attention must be paid. She set about, even during the primary, burnishing her Trumpist bona fides.

And that is the crux of today's LITD observation regarding why post-America can't have nice things. 

She is not wrong that a massive re-orientation of public school curricula is the only way to retrieve it from the sewer into which it's fallen. She is also on solid ground using Hillsdale College's guidance on how to go about that. (Although I have come to have reservation about even that distinguished institution. President Larry Arnn was a signatory the National Conservatism Statement of Principles, a document the problematic nature of which I wrote about recently at Precipice. )

Here's the more immediate problem with the closeness between Trumpism and Hillsdale: Trump glommed on to the effort to resist identity politics militancy in education, not because he understood the first damn thing about Hillsdale-style classical education, but because he was told it would make him look like a winner. Hillsdale, in turn, was obviously thrilled to have the imprimatur of a sitting US president for its approach. And then the left-leaning media was able to have a field day with Lake's endorsement of it. (Hillsdale's Christian, doncha know):

The Donald Trump-endorsed nominee for Arizona governor wants the state's schoolchildren to learn from a curriculum inspired in part by Trump. 

"We want a curriculum that makes sense. We want a curriculum that sets our kids up for success," Republican Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor, said at an event last May at the state Capitol. "I believe in the Hillsdale College curriculum."

Lake favors a history and civics curriculum developed by Hillsdale College, a private Christian school in Michigan that's influential in right-wing circles.

Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn was the chairman of former President Trump's short-lived 1776 Commission, created to support what Trump called "patriotic education." 

A Hillsdale dean was the commission's executive director.

But, true to form for a Trumpist, Lake has put the lie to any seriousness with which she personally engages a subject like education reform with this recent doozy:

Referring to DeSantis, Lake said, “He is gutsy. The guy has bigger — wait, let me think about how I’m going to word this,” she told the crowd. “My staff always says, 'Whatever you do, do not say balls.' So I’m not going to say it,” she added to laughs.

First, she tried, “That guy has a backbone made of steel.”

Then, she took it to the street. “I’ll tell you what he’s got. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but he’s got ‘BDE.’ Anybody know what that means?” she asked, referring to the phrase “big d*** energy” before advising, “Ask your kids about it later.”

She reworded it a bit to cheers and more laughter. “I call it ‘Big DeSantis Energy,’” she said before adding, “He’s got the same kind of BDE that President Trump has, and frankly, he has the kind of BDE that we want all of our elected leaders to have.”

One thing that will be interesting to see is how Hillsdale attempts to do cleanup or distance itself from Lake's clown act.

And thus do the prospects for truly reviving a deep respect for the West's foundations, as well as for prioritizing decorum and dignified bearing, dwindle yet further.  

 

 

The Mar-a-Lago FBI raid - initial thoughts

 Not a lot, really, because anything anybody is currently saying is a silly hot take at best and more likely dangerously inflammatory provocation.

So not much from LITD until we have some notion of what the FBI was able to gather from this action.

I will point out that FBI chief Christopher Wray was appointed by Trump and every Republican Senator who voted on his confirmation voted in the affirmative.

But Fox News, Newsmax, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump look equal parts childish with their whataboutism (Hunter Biden's laptop! Bengazi!) and reckless in the extreme with their civil war intimations. One also sees a lot of America-is-now-a-banana-republic talk this morning as well.

Deep breath, everybody. Wait until something solid is known so you don't squander your credibility.

Peter Meijer likewise inhabits a narrow sliver of terrain

 Many of my essays over at Precipice share a common theme, common enough that I often title them "The Sliver of Terrain I Inhabit Grows Narrower Still."

What I mean by that is that I can neither think of myself as a Republican any longer, given over as that party is to an identity as a cult in thrall to the most unfit president in US history, but am horrified by progressivism's all-too-successful aim of dismantling Western civilization. 

I usually know better, after much experience getting entangled in toxic pissing matches on social media, than to chime in on the comment thread under some pronouncement by either a Trumpist or a leftist. But once in a while, against my better judgement, I take the bait. And then, after some unproductive back and forth, I have to take a shower. If it's not "you ineffectual little dweebs don't really want to fight," it's "you have a problem with equal rights for all people."

It wears me out to think about it.

When public figures inhabit this narrow sliver, the stakes are higher. 

Representative Peter Meijer from Michigan can tell you all about that:

After the impeachment vote, I was immediately censured by two county parties in my old district. In my new district, the Republican Party of the largest county repudiated me a few weeks ago. The Michigan GOP Chair joked about my assassination. There have been too many online threats to count.

The piece to which I'm linking and from which I've excerpted is about how the Democrat party is shoveling money at the campaigns of MAGA Republicans contending against sane people like Meijer in primary races. The motivation seems to be to make sure the public's impression that MAGA is the true face of modern Republicanism is firmly entrenched. 

So a guy like Meijer has even more kinds of slings and arrows directed his way. They don't just come from the drool-besotted true believers or Democrat political opponents, but Democrat strategists who see dirty pool as an advantageous maneuver. 

It's no fun - in fact, it's dispiriting as hell - to stand on this infinitesimal piece of real estate, but it's the only place to plant one's feet after having surveyed the lay of the land and checked in with one's sense of right and wrong. 

May the good representative prevail.  

Thoughts on Pelosi visiting Taiwan

 She can't really not go now, can she?

The entire Asian trip, with an itinerary that includes such key Pacific rim allies as Japan and South Korea, was supposed to happen in April but got delayed due to COVID. And the rhetoric from China has been ratcheting up ever since the trip has been rescheduled. Hu Xijin, a prominent commentator for Global Times, has tweeted that shooting down Pelosi's plane is an option if her trip includes a stop in Taipei. 

It's a done deal, as far as the Taiwanese government is concerned.  She's expected to stay overnight.

The Biden administration is not so keen on the idea, of course, but it can't stop her. The three branches of our government are coequal. 

tLots of seasoned observers of the world stage caution against it, and they have a point. It's a high-stakes gambit, for sure. It raises that age-old question of when and where, if at all, to make irreversible changes to the global balance of power.

China is not currently the only adversary rattling a saber in an alarming manner. Russia and North Korea are mentioning nuclear war as part of their rhetoric. Iran is enriching uranium to levels sufficient for nuclear breakout.

Consider, though, the viewpoint of Senator Ben Sasse, one of the last remaining persons of principle and depth in the U.S. government:

“Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there’s not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it. No more feebleness and self-deterrence. This is very simple: Taiwan is an ally and the Speaker of the House of Representatives should meet with the Taiwanese men and women who stare down the threat of Communist China.”

He has a point, too. If, at some point, the U.S. does not demonstrate leadership and loyalty to that portion of the world that shares our basic values, the bad guys run the place.

Op-ed writers, buy definition, are expected to offer conclusive opinions on matters such as this. Since this is a blog, I don't feel constrained in that way.

There are downsides to either choice that the House speaker makes. And she either will or she won't stop by Taiwan on her trip. 

I just hope that American society can see now that the era of corporate joint ventures, student visas and supply chains heavily dependent on the People's Republic of China ought to be behind us. China only ever opened up to the West for its own advantage. It remains the snake in the grass it's been since 1949.