I Like Ike; Lawson, R.I.P; & Big Brother Gets a New Toy
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh traces the through line from FDR’s new style of American governance to Joe Biden’s recent executive orders, which point to the end of republican governance.
To Save America, Abolish the Regulatory Agencies
Lest you were still laboring under the illusion that we live in a representative democracy, aka a republic, let the scales now once and for ever fall from your eyes. The Republic that Boomers of my generation grew up pledging allegiance to every day in the classrooms of 1950s America, hand on heart, is no more. In fact, it died during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, which first bollixed up the recovery from the Great Depression by extending it for a decade while FDR and his "progressive" advisers (some of highly uncertain loyalty) gradually introduced neo-fascist central-planning (they were great admirers of Mussolini). Then they caught a lucky break at Pearl Harbor and suddenly the brakes were off. Washington, D.C. never looked back, booming from a backwater burg to the capital city of the planet Earth in the span of a few decades.
Dwight Eisenhower, the victorious Allied senior commander in the European theater, most famously warned the nation at the end of his tenure in January 1961 about the "military-industrial complex." As the general who oversaw the greatest mass mobilization in American history and who fought an industrial-strength war with it, Ike was well-positioned see the danger ahead. That particular danger came and went with the Soviet Union but his words apply today to a newer, domestic threat:
We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
"Good judgment," however, is precisely what's lacking in today's Washington. Bureaucratic parasitism has only accelerated since start of the Nixon administration (Nixon was Ike's veep), as demands for D.C. to "do something" about pretty much everything grew and grew. Having won the war in Europe with Soviet and British help, and defeated the Japanese Empire practically by themselves, Americans felt there was no task too big to tackle. On Nixon's watch —Tricky Dick's fatal flaw, like Donald Trump's, was the fool's errand of trying to get his enemies (who detested him) to like him—the regulatory agencies were summoned into being, dark golems bent on destroying the Constitution in the guise of trying to Save the Earth.
One of the first up was the Environmental Protection Agency, the demon spawn of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandated (what an ugly word for a democracy to employ) "environmental impact" statements for future federal projects. Nixon put teeth in the law with the creation by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency at the end of that same year. Then the unelected bureaucrats took over, and turned what had been sold as benign into a ravenous, uncontrollable, punitive beast. And now here we are:
The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.
It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change.
Yes, from tree-hugging to the federal government's forcing you to buy an electric car by leaving you no other choice was but the work of a half-century. But that's exactly where a regulatory agency's path inevitably leads. While they are ostensibly created by legislative acts or executive orders, once up and running they are essentially accountable to no one. Even worse, they also have quasi-juridical power, which means as far as you're concerned, they're judge, jury, and executioner. The EPA is dangerous because by its germaphobic, totalitarian logic, anything that can affect "the environment" is fair game for its basilisk glare. That mud puddle in your back yard is tomorrow's "wetland," buddy, so don't even think about turning it into a swimming hole.
Tom Finnerty contributed an obituary for the recently departed British statesman Nigel Lawson.
'No Good Whining/ About a Silver Lining'
Lawson was one of the forces behind the success of Thatcherism, serving in several key roles in Margaret Thatcher's government, culminating in his 1983 appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that position he became the driving force behind cutting the U.K.'s unsustainably high taxes and reforming the country's cumbersome financial regulations. British business was reinvigorated, leading directly to what is known as the "Lawson Boom," which saw unemployment cut in half and a budget deficit of £10.5 billion in 1983 transformed into a budget surplus of £4.1 billion by the time he resigned 1989.
Of particular interest to us at The Pipeline is Lawson's late-career turn as one of Britain's few skeptics of the received environmentalist narrative. As described by Net-Zero Watch — a publication of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which Lawson founded — he first became interested in the subject of global warming after reviewing the correspondence of senior government bureaucrats on the subject which he said demonstrated “a combination of ignorance and obfuscation that was indeed worthy of Sir Humphrey,” the manipulative civil servant on the BBC comedy Yes, Minister. According to Andrew Montford, Lawson was "Intrigued by the wrongheadedness of it all" and inspired to do something about it.
In his role as chairman of the House of Lords Economic Affair Committee, he persuaded his colleagues to launch an inquiry into the economics of climate change. Almost unique among subsequent Parliamentary inquiries, the witnesses included a number of eminent scientists who were on the sceptical side of catastrophism, as well as the usual chorus of the climate alarmist faithful. Such scrutiny was never to be repeated.
Beyond that, he wrote the surprise best-seller, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (for which he'd initially struggled to find a publisher), and in 2009 helped found the GWPF, an organization which has the very large task of pushing back on the climate hysteria of essentially every other institution in British life.
Steven Hayward wrote about California’s struggle to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant online after having previously forced it to begin the process of shutting down.
The Devil's in the Diablo Details
When the decision to close California’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon was announced in 2016, anyone with a lick of sense—or basic energy literacy—knew this decision would have to be reversed. Diablo Canyon produces about 9 percent of California’s total electricity, and moreover can produce electricity 24/7 virtually year-round, unlike intermittent wind and solar power that California has been installing in a futile rush to be greener-than-thou. Removing Diablo’s reliable baseload power risked destabilizing California’s grid, if not increasing the risk of electricity shortages and blackouts.
Governor Gavin Newsom finally bowed to reality and persuaded California’s own regulators and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to extend the life of Diablo beyond the planned shutdown when its current license expires in 2025. But there is a chance this sensible decision might not stick. The technical rules of the NRC and other environmental litigation may yet prolong the farce.
Like the European nations that have recently returned to coal-fired power as reality has intruded on their green dreams, the Diablo reversal is a similar exercise in revealing the perversity of energy policy today. When the 2025 closure of Diablo Canyon was announced, Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE), the owner of the plant, simply lied to the public that it could replace Diablo Canyon’s output with more wind and solar power along with “conservation,” and that electricity rates would not rise. (Environmental groups who had pressured for the closure of Diablo Canyon claimed that it would reduce costs to consumers, which should have been another obvious sign that everything about this decision was a lie.) Yet within three months PG&E was asking California’s Public Utilities Commission for a rate increase to cope with the cost of closing the plant and replacing its output with new sources.
But PG&E actually had no choice. While the NRC was prepared to review and extend Diablo Canyon’s operating license (though this is a ten-year process which PG&E had started in 2009), the state of California indicated that it would not renew the necessary state permits for Diablo Canyon to remain open. Moreover, California’s mandates on utilities to increase their carbon-free electricity sources excludes both nuclear power and new hydropower, which meant PG&E couldn’t meet its legal mandates if it kept Diablo Canyon open.
Despite the green boilerplate that California could replace Diablo with more solar and wind power, in practice it means relying more on natural gas backup plants and power purchases from other states. Even the Washington Post was able to figure that out: “losing down Diablo Canyon would be the definition of climate incoherence.” Once Gov. Newsom and the small handful of sane climate activists realized this too, the sequence to keep Diablo open began to take shape. But there are three problems to overcome.
Lisa Schiffren wrote about a new government-funded tool in the Left’s war on supposed “misinformation.”
When Journalists Become Big Brother
In 2021 and 2022, during the disastrous Covid lockdowns, the U.S. government gave professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison upwards of $5.7 million to develop software to help correct other people’s “misinformation” when it appears online. The fact checking engine they have built, called “Course Correct,” is supposed to help journalists identify trending scientific and political “misinformation,” and ‘fix’ false claims in real time. It uses machine learning and natural language processing to check social media posts.
“Challenges of misinformation are not restricted to elections or Covid or to a particular community,” said one of the professors who got the grant. “Countering misinformation will require vigilance and adaptation.” What it ought to require is strict oversight by people committed to the First Amendment. In fact, the National Science Foundation is funding the research.
Presumably this search engine is being developed for that time when Facebook or Twitter cannot be relied upon to censor views that are at odds with the preferred establishment narrative. It’s pretty daring of the Feds to do: The revelations about how the FBI and CIA were sent to work with social media/tech companies, to censor online views that did not comport with the Administration’s chosen explanations, have not gone over all that well.
It must be asked: what is misinformation? Is it a genuine, factual mistake? 2+2=5? Or is it just a difference in opinion over what the facts are? To ask is to answer. In the wake of the aggressive censorship that accompanied the developing knowledge of Covid-19 and the attendant disagreements over masks, vaccines, lockdowns, social distancing, and school closings, we know that the government was rabid in suppressing anything that challenged its preferred narrative of the moment. People were kicked off social media and worse for suggesting that the Covid virus originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, called that view "racist." These days the lab leak theory is the preferred explanation of the FBI and many fellow agencies.
Richard Fernandez contributed a piece on the reality behind artificial intelligence.
A.I. — It's People All the Way Down
The World Economic Forum website has an entire section dedicated to the subject of artificial intelligence, which describes it as the glowing future, yet is fraught with peril. To avoid the danger WEF recommends – of course –governance. It's important to note these governance guidelines come, not from the machines themselves, but from people. This is ironic because people caused the ethical problems that need to be governed in the first place. A.I. itself is not theoretically bigoted. But humans are, and AI systems are designed and programmed by humans reflect those biases.
To understand why people are both the source of problems and remedies of A.I. it is necessary to explain how the technology works. Contrary to popular belief, the Chat-Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and similar engines now in the news don't really think. Only something that doesn't yet exist, Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.), is capable of learning and reasoning across different domains like a human. Nobody knows if it can ever be built.
As the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (A.I.) has become clearer, so too have the risks posed by unsafe or unethical A.I. systems... Recognizing this, actors across industry, government and civil society have rolled out an expanding array of ethical principles to guide the development and use of A.I. – over 175 to date. While the explosive growth in A.I. ethics guidelines is welcome, it has created an implementation gap – it is easier to define the ethical standards a system should meet than to design and deploy a system to meet them.
As of 2022, AGI remains speculative. No such system has yet been demonstrated. Opinions vary both on whether and when artificial general intelligence will arrive.
The A.I. that the media talks about, like GPT, mimics the reasoning process, but it is very much a human creation. It is trained on large amounts of text data, using probabilistic models to classify its patterns and structures. It then generates new data that shares similar characteristics, so that the new fits the same pattern as the old. By this means it generates images, text, music, and video alike to its training set. When you interact with a GPT, it is reflective, like a mirror, but on a monumental scale.
To get some idea of its scope, ChatGPT-3 has 175 billion parameters in its model based on 45 terabytes of data scraped from the Internet. But ChatGPT-4 will have 100 trillion parameters, approximately 500 times the size of its predecessor. This engine must contain all of the relevant information needed to solve the giant model and derive the pattern and the amounts required are stupendous.
The ability to produce creative mimicry has made Generative A.I. useful for a wide range of applications such as content creation, data augmentation, and simulation. However, this also threatens the status quo because it could create fake or misleading content, with counterfeits of real people or subtly doctored narratives. This is unsurprising because creative imitation is exactly what it is designed to do by extending old patterns into new input data. But A.I. can be directed through governance rules via a combination of software engineering techniques, machine learning algorithms, and human oversight to perform only certain, pre-approved acts.
One recent example of human oversight, applied to social media (though the principle is the same for A.I.) was the revolving door between Democrat Deep State and Big Tech at Twitter. The employees responsible for “resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalations” in Twitter—the very definition of governance—were connected to the CIA or FBI and took political sides. Governance.
With this background it can be seen that perhaps the most misleading words in the WEF framework are the phrases "unsafe or unethical A.I. systems" and "A.I. governance." They suggest the locus of the problem resides in the technology; that it is an independent agency that must be kept from running amuck. But in reality it is a distinction without a difference. Ethical problems originate in humans as do the proferred governance solutions. It's people all the way down.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, took a train.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Orienting
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Steven Hayward, Clarice Feldman, and Tom Finnerty. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!