A New National Anthem; SBF Revisited; and Peterson Defiant.
A New National Anthem; SBF Revisited; and Peterson Defiant.
Happy New Year, to all of our dear readers! We ended 2022 with a series of our best pieces of the year, which you should be sure to check out.
For his first Editor’s Column of 2023, Michael Walsh briefly returned to his music-critic roots and proposed a substitute for America’s underwhelming national anthem:
Of Thee I Can't Sing
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a great nation in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a great national anthem. Such is the case with the great nation known as the United States of America, whose current anthem combines martial words from a war that America basically lost with a rumbustious tune—an old British drinking song—that is impossible for most people to sing. The fact that the first verse ends with a question mark—"O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"—is neither auspicious nor comforting. And when it's mangled like this...
Ouch. Which is a shame, because even though its origins as "To Anacreon in Heaven" suggest the robust and frisky good times of Hogarth, the melody itself is a lovely ballad that requires a tenor with a good top to make its octave-and-a-half range effective in performance. Here's how it should be sung:
Combined with Francis Scott Key's hastily composed poem, "The Defence of Fort McHenry," the piece quickly became known as the "Star Spangled Banner" and was adopted by the U.S. Navy in 1899 and played nationwide by military bands after a 1916 executive order by Woodrow Wilson; in 1918 it was played during the seventh-inning stretch at the World Series. Finally, it was declared by Congress to be the official national anthem of the United States in 1931, and its status was signed into law by Herbert Hoover.
It's had a great run, but let's face it: it's time to replace it. It's been bludgeoned and butchered into non-existence, its melody rendered unrecognizable by the melismas and wails that now ornament it. Give it back to the military bands, which can actually play it, and place Key's poem under glass at the National Archives in perpetuity. But replace it with what?
Over the years, a number of songs have functioned as an unofficial anthem, including "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (sung to the tune of the British anthem, "God Save the King"), and "Hail, Columbia." Many have long advocated that the pastoral "America the Beautiful," first published in 1910, be our anthem. And the late Ray Charles certainly makes a convincing case for it, wailing melismas and all:
But that ode to the beauty of the American continent's still not quite right. Nobody's afraid of purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. Instead, there's another long-popular patriotic song, "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean," that's also functioned as the American anthem; it is perhaps the most quintessentially American tune of the bunch, Have a listen:
It's so American, in fact, that it often pops up elsewhere as an instant and unmistakable signal of national pride: in The Music Man, for example, or in many of the works of the early 20th-century composer Charles Ives.
Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, wrote about SBF:
The Political and Social Significance of Sam Bankman-Fried
Over the last few weeks, Sam Bankman Fried, having been extradited from the Bahamas, flown to California first class, and granted bail on a 250 million dollar bond (which allowed him to sit comfortably in his parent’s Palo Alto home instead of in some grubby jail cell), has now pleaded not guilty to the many charges against him. There’s been some populist indignation over the apparently indulgent terms of his pre-trial detention. But it’s difficult to be too indignant about what is at best a stay of execution.
Most white-collar criminals avoid prison until convicted. By now SBF is probably too famous to make a successful run for it. And given that his two top accomplices, one his former girlfriend, are apparently singing like Maria Callas to the prosecutors, he faces the realistic prospect of several decades behind bars. He might escape justice by committing suicide but that could be justice of a more uncertain kind.
As for the purely criminal aspects of the fall of SBF and his crypto-currency exchange empire, FTX, Andrew McCarthy, an experienced federal prosecutor, has already established a key point: that FTX frauds had nothing to do with the “opaque” character of crypto-currencies as such but was instead a plain old-fashioned Ponzi scheme. SBF simply diverted crypto funds entrusted to him by investors into his other failing enterprises.
If the “opaque” character of the “crypto” world was irrelevant to the operation of SBF’s fraud, however, it was vital to its social and political success. The crash of FTX should have been easily foreseeable not only by investors but also by the financial pundits, the organizers of financial conferences, the political parties that accepted his massive donations, the business and style pages of the mainstream media, and above all by the corporate global leaders of the World Economic Forum that meets annually at Davos in Switzerland. After all, the company had been offering very high fixed rates of return in a notoriously risky market less than a decade since Bernie Madoff had demonstrated the inevitable collapse of such enterprises.
Yet only weeks before the inevitable happened, SBF was an icon on the style pages of business as well as mainstream media, a panel member photographed alongside former president Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair at investment conferences, the second largest donor (after George Soros) to the Democrats in the 2020 campaign, and he was a rising star in the world of the WEF—FTX was touted as a partner on its website, SBF himself was a speaker at its conference last spring, and if the recent unpleasantness had not persuaded the WEF to scrub these references from its website, he was odds-on to be added to their pantheon of Young Global Leaders.
How could the Great and the Good of our world get it so wrong? One reason, of course, is that crashes (both of the system and of particular enterprises) occur at fairly regular intervals because both market participants and official regulators come to share the same intellectual error: usually that, unlike all previous such occasions, the worst won’t happen this time because we know enough to prevent it. The worst then happens.
Peter Smith dug deeper into the senseless environmentalist policies of Australia’s Labor Government.
'Climate' Scam in Oz Goes from Bad to Worse
As a major producer and exporter of thermal coal and natural gas, with lots more to be tapped, Australia is well placed to ride out the forlorn pursuit of renewables. Instead, Australia’s governments fancifully see themselves leading the daring quest to save the planet. Accordingly, policies of uncommon futility and inanity ensue. Two prime examples came to malodourous fruition in the lead up to Christmas. Christmas gifts, if you will, for a population which richly deserves all that it gets having swallowed the climate scam hook, line and sinker.
The Energy Security Board (ESB), just one of a multiplicity of climate-change authorities, had an integral part in the derring-do. Alas, though full of activists, the ESB didn’t stay the course. Bizarrely, common sense won out. The ESB oversaw a scheme, called the “capacity mechanism,” intended to ease Australia through the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. The scheme calls for payments to energy providers in order that they might have capacity at the ready when renewables failed to deliver. Natural gas was very much in the mix, as you would expect, as also was coal for the time being. A detailed design of the scheme was to be delivered to federal and state governments in early 2023.
Spot the problem? The envisaged use of fossil fuels in the transition is not nearly pure enough for these clean-climate times. And, last August, the ESB was given a damn good telling off by pedigreed greens and lost its carriage of the capacity mechanism – sullied and shamed by its continued flirtation with coal and gas. Each state decided that it would do its own thing and that thing did not include “dirty” coal or gas.
At this point, sane people might think that they're being gaslighted. Surely, a shortfall of wind and sun must be met with a flow of baseload power. Logically, that’s where gas-fired peaking plants might fill the breach. Apparently not. Pumped hydro is envisaged, though it is missing in action. Batteries are envisaged, though their effect is trivial in the scheme of things. Green hydrogen is envisaged, though it is pipedream. Finally, interstate power swaps are envisaged; based on massive overbuilding of not-yet-built wind and solar farms and thousands of not-yet-built kilometres of transmission infrastructure. And, still, what will happen during evenings of extensive wind droughts? Cold candlelit suppers ahead.
It’s senseless. But, best to remember, when it comes to climate policies, it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse. And so it is that Australia’s government, headed by Anthony Albanese of the far left of the left-wing Labor Party, recently had a well-worn idea which had proved popular among the apparatchiks in communist Eastern Europe.
David Cavena wrote about climate reparations.
The 'Climate Emergency' Is Not Our Problem
Late in 2022, the U.N. decided that industrial, capitalistic (Western) nations must spend a few trillion dollars more, per year, bailing out poorer nations, many, if not most, of which reject both industrialization and capitalism. Which is why they are poor. President Biden offered Indonesia $20 billion for the climate scam. Why? To close their coal plants because the “rising” seas may become problematic. Even if that is true, why does that mean they need the fruits of our labor? America giving Indonesia money is just our providing labor and moving that labor to them with money, right? I don't work for Indonesia.
Let’s look at the numbers: Indonesia is a G20 member nation, with a Quality of Life score of 96.85, ranking #75 on their scale. While this is below the United States (#19), Indonesia outranks America in Safety (54:52) and Cost of Living Index (32:70); Indonesia is a bit safer and has a far lower cost of living than America. With a working age (15-64) population of 189,363,580, (12/2022), Indonesia’s GDP is 15th-highest in the world, at $1.05 trillion USD, or $5,545 per person of working age. America’s GDP is highest in the world, at $20.89 trillion, with a working age population of 214,685,514, or $97,305 per person of working age.
Indonesia has 54,716 km of coastline. Evidently rising seas mean the United States needs to pay for some remediation. But if that’s the case, Canada, the nation with the world’s longest coastline at 243,042 km, would also need our aid. If Indonesia needs $365,524 per km of coastline, wouldn’t Canada need the same per km, or $88.9 billion?
Indonesia has 5,123 people per kilometer of coastline; Canada only 159. Indonesia, with 32 times as many people per kilometer of coastline, should be able to remediate the “problem” much more easily with their own labor than Canada with theirs.
None of this makes any sense when you get down to facts, even if the climate scam were real.
Liberals never seem to really get the law of supply and demand, and Clarice Feldman has another example of this phenomenon:
'Conservation' Programs No Substitute for More Energy
I remember in 2006 arguing that a government plan to have utility companies retrofit for free homes in order to make them more energy efficient would not result in substantial reductions in electric demand or free up energy for other users. The point to me seemed obvious. When the cost of home heating is high, people would be more conscious of turning off lights and appliances when not in use. But if—as this plan provided in effect—homeowners would not after retrofitting pay more for increased energy use, they might prefer a cozier, warmer house or a brighter one or even add on a lovely heated porch.
Such views were of course cast aside by the big thinkers and here and abroad, and governments got involved in subsidizing retrofitting for conservation. President Obama launched home energy retrofit programs (the Home Energy score pilot program in 2010) to assess homes and offer cost-effective recommendations and low-cost loans up to $25,000 would be made available for “energy-saving improvements.”
In 2016 the domestic home energy conservation program became even more ambitious when the administration announced a Clean Energy Savings for All Americans program. The largest part of the program was the installation of solar and wind “to create a more inclusive workforce,” the latter, of course, padding the treasuries of non-government organizations, ostensibly to take people off the streets to train and employ them to install insulation, new windows, doors and solar equipment in existing homes (a project which to my mind seriously underestimates the skills in such construction work and overestimates the interest in such arduous work by the unemployed).
How this has fared I am unaware, but a similar program in Great Britain seems to have validated my earlier concerns about the efficacy of such projects. The far-left newspaper, The Guardian recently described a University of Cambridge report on the long-term effect of attic and wall insulation, and the report was what I had anticipated years ago. After retrofitting, there is a “rebound effect” which cancels out reductions in gas use. Put simply, with the cost of gas heating of their homes down, homeowners turned up the heat, opened windows to air out stuffy rooms and even built on extensions to their homes.
And Tom Finnerty contributed two blog posts on Jordan Peterson, who was recently ordered by the Ontario College of Psychologists to submit to "mandatory social-media communication retraining" (that is, reeducation) or face the loss of his license to practice clinical psychology. Peterson has vowed to fight this action, which he believes is a direct result of his having criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and for his occasional public agreement with the Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre.
Peterson Ordered to Report to Reeducation Camp for Criticizing Trudeau
And:
Pierre Poilievre Responds to Jordan Peterson's 'Reeducation' Order
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Peter Smith, Jack Dunphy, and Tom Finnerty.
All this and more this week at The Pipeline!