Malaise Forever ?; Rishi's Course Correction; & Corrupt Science.
Malaise Forever ?; Rishi's Course Correction; & Corrupt Science.
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh offered a reevaluation of Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech, as a foundational moment for the America we live in today, and pondered how we might move onto something better.
Good-Bye to All That
Just in time for former president Jimmy Carter's 99th birthday -- only the good die young -- the United States is presently lost in a fog of malaise. Everybody hates the status quo but, like the weather until the arrival of full-throated but useless "climate" hysteria, nobody does anything about it.
The ongoing, post-electoral tussle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has cast a pall over all our politics since the fall of 2020, and shows no signs of abating. That the Biden presidency has been a disaster is beyond dispute: the economy, booming under Trump, is in a shambles, race relations are poisonous, civil order in large parts of the country (mostly in big blue cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle) has broken down, and the woke mind virus has infected whole swaths of the country, including the media, academe, and practically all of corporate America.
Thanks to the Covid hoax, "customer service" and indeed the concept of service itself has become a joke. Serious questions have been raised about the mNRA "vaccine," both concerning its effectiveness against the Wuhan flu (negligible) and its danger to the human body (considerable). Similarly, the man-made "climate change" hoax has driven a sizable portion of the populace insane with worry over a non-existent, indeed impossible, event.
And as far as the "Russian collusion" hoax is concerned, we now know that it was a) started by a vengeful loser, Hillary Clinton, b) was weaponized by a radicalized intelligence community that not only should have known better but in fact did know better, and c) was irresponsibly parroted by an Ivy-League dominated media establishment that has long since gleefully abandoned any pretense to objectivity and is now purely and unabashedly "progressively" partisan.
Carter's July 15, 1979 speech was widely ridiculed on both sides of the aisle, and immediately dubbed the "malaise" speech, although that word never appears in the half-hour address very effectively written by Hendrik Hertzberg. Personally, at the time I thought it was a good speech, and right on the money, even though I was never much of a Carter fan and eagerly voted for Ronald Reagan the following year. Today, 44 years later, it actually seems right on target, as Peggy Noonan noted in the Wall Street Journal back in February….
Despite the polls, which at this point only offer a choice between two superannuated, erratic geriatrics, the voting public understands that neither Trump nor Biden is the way forward. Both are running in large part on resentment of the other, and of the nearly -- nearly -- 50 percent of Americans who, at the moment, support them. But there is a near-zero chance that either man will be on the ballot in November of 2024 when the only poll that matters takes place. (Ask Hillary Clinton if she disagrees.) Biden is visibly crumbling before everybody's eyes, while Trump's King Lear imitation on his vanity social-media platform, Truth Social, has become a national embarrassment.
Further, the increasingly surly Biden's performance in office is the best argument against returning him to power, while Trump's disgraceful final year in office, which includes both turning the country over to the sinister Tony Fauci and summoning the demons of January 6 to challenge an election even his closet advisers later admitted under oath they knew was lost, disqualifies him from another turn in the Oval Office.
Our founding editor, John O’Sullivan, wrote about the U.K.’s halting attempts to back away from net-zero.
Anterooms to the Suicide Club
Take Britain as an example. It passed the Climate Change Act that not only made net-zero policies legally binding but even established a Climate Change Committee, packed with zealots for a Puritan Green future, that would report to Parliament on whether the government was fulfilling its obligations to the Apocalypse. At the same time, to safeguard itself from any second thoughts about the direction of policy, HMG also joined other countries in the Paris Accords and similar anterooms to the Suicide Club on the assumption that they would then be bullied back into the International Stupidity Consensus.
And why was the U.K. government leaving this "Consensus"? Exactly what temptation was it protecting Britain from? The unfashionable answer is that until now it has been vainly trying to avoid the reality of democracy. Now, however, when an election is looming distantly into view, the unavoidable political reality that the voters don’t like the costs of net-zero which are becoming more obvious and more painful with every passing day.
Thus, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is letting it be known that he intends to delay the ban on the sale of new petrol-driven cars from 2030 to 2035, water down the ban on gas heaters from 2030, and in general adopt a general attitude that the U.K. economy cannot be sacrificed to unrealistic Green targets of energy reduction. But won’t the U.K. face an international blowback from other countries under the treaties all agreed? My advice is: rule nothing out. Addiction to economic self-contradiction is a powerful force in the United Nations and the world’s establishments.
For the moment, however, the French under centrist President Emmanuel Macron, Germany under a coalition of Greens, Socialists, and Liberals, and Holland facing an election and a rebellious electorate, are all talking about exemptions, delays, and second thoughts on net-zero. Their industries are hobbled by it; their companies are squealing about it; and their voters are frightened by it.
It’s quite hard to mount a posse against “carbon backsliding” when almost all its potential members are looking at the rising costs of hay for the horses and hemp for the rope. Not only are they unlikely to hold Sunak to account, but they might even follow him.
Steven Hayward contributed a piece about the corrupting overlap of science and governance.
The Era of Policy-Based Evidence-Making
We should have known we were in for a new level of flim-flam when government officials started saying that the public should “follow ‘the science’.” Attaching the definite modifier to “science” implies that “science” on whatever subject is uniform and “settled,” as we’re endlessly told by the climate cult, and more recently the Covid cult, aka the "Branch Covidians."
This is the antithesis of science and the scientific method, which emphasizes hypothesis, skepticism, dissent, competing theories, vigorous debate, testing and re-testing. The history of science, as Thomas Kuhn explained in his influential but oft misunderstood Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is a series of dominant scientific models that are overturned by subsequent challenge. Sometimes the challenges are suppressed by incumbent institutions, and the example of Galileo is usually offered as an example of something that could never happen in our modern, enlightened times. In fact the kind of reputational damage and official opposition Galileo experienced is still happening on a daily basis.
The evidence mounts that virtually none of our scientific establishment can be trusted—certainly none that has any connection to or dependence on government funding. Government agencies based on their supposed technical expertise claim that they practice “evidence-based policy making,” but the truth is the reverse: we live in an age where governments practice policy-based evidence-making.
There is by now a sorry recent history stretching back at least to the U.S. government’s determination in the 1990s to use the supposed peril of second-hand tobacco smoke to extract billions of dollars from tobacco companies and justify stringent new smoking regulations. (Many of these regulations have been waived for newly legal marijuana smoking, which shows the power of culture over “science.”) When the government’s epidemiological studies didn’t find substantial harm from second-hand smoke at the typical 95 percent confidence level that is standard for establishing statistical robustness, the EPA simply lowered the statistical standard to 90 percent, and suppressed other contrary findings, to claim “proof” of harm in order to justify regulation.
This has been a consistent pattern for decades with government bureaucracies in the U.S. and abroad. “Scientific” findings always conveniently align with the regulatory desires of administrative agencies. In the U.S., agency “science advisory boards” (SABs) are always stacked with pro-agency “experts” while skeptical or competing perspectives are deliberately excluded, and the entire process is backstopped by lavish government grants directed to sympathetic university researchers, consultancies, and advocacy groups to carry on public propaganda campaigns. In some cases, agencies will ignore their SABs in the rare cases where the SAB offers a finding contrary to policy.
At some point the “coincidence” that “new findings” justify tightening a regulatory standard ought to raise suspicion. But challenging tendentious government “science” is difficult in the formal review processes, and courts have always deferred to the “expertise” of the agencies, making court challenges nearly impossible to succeed.
The omerta of the “science-based community” has nowhere been more evident than in "climate change," where the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) systematically excludes dissenting scientists, pressures journals not to publish contrary findings, and marginalizes contrary publications that somehow manage to slip through, all in service of creating a manufactured “consensus” that demands absolute fealty.
Our newest contributor, Brandon Weichert, took a look at the foreign policy implications of the Biden Administration’s war on the energy sector.
Biden's Continuing War on Energy Independence
Who benefits from the increased price of oil? The very regimes that the United States has problems with. Although the Saudis are a longtime regional partner in the Middle East, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has long been fraught, even before 9/11. The Biden administration has become especially antagonistic toward the Kingdom over their human rights abuses. Yet, by cutting American domestic energy production, Biden is ensuring the U.S. will be even more dependent on this unstable, even distasteful ally.
When asked by Western media why he was supporting the unilateral cut to oil production, Saudi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman explained that he was cutting oil production to boost prices because he was, "trying to get Saudi Arabia on the right track." Since 2018, when he took Saudi ARAMCO, the nation's oil producer, public to raise capital for his' "Vision 2030" program, Salman has been trying to diversify the oil-based Saudi economy to ensure that his kingdom can escape the supposed "resource curse" that befalls most oil rich nations, especially in the developing world. To sustain that plan, however, he needs the global price of oil stay high.
Elsewhere, an embattled Russian Federation has consented to cut its oil production by 300,000 bpd. That, along with Saudi Arabia, is helping to drive up the global price of oil to stratospheric levels. In Russia's case, the higher the price of oil on the global market, the stronger their economy will be. That's important because the Biden administration has decided to risk nuclear armageddon with the Russians over the fate of Ukraine. Russia's primary economic driver is the nation's massive fossil fuel production capabilities.
Generally, when the price of energy is relatively high on the global market, as it has been during Biden's presidency, Russia has greater wealth to invest in their war machine. Each time the Russian Federation has become militarily assertive with its neighbors, whether it be their attack on neighboring Georgia in 2008 or their annexation of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014, it corresponded to unusually high prices in the global oil market, causing Biden and his fellow Democrats to fixate on a resurgent Russian threat.
Yet, they have failed to understand how their obsession with a fictive "climate change and subsequent decision to cut American energy production has empowered Russia's military expansion. If Biden truly wanted to curb Russian revanchism in their Near-Abroad, then he'd be doing everything in his power to increase American domestic energy production, alleged consequences to the environment be damned.
Finally, the administration's failed energy and foreign policies have further empowered China. Because Biden has worked assiduously to isolate Russia on the world stage over their invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russians have been forced to sell their massive oil stores to oil-hungry nations, such China, at a discount. Meanwhile, Biden's attacks on Saudi Arabia over human rights violations have created a serious opening that Beijing has exploited to gain greater access to Mideast oil. And let's not even get started on how Biden's "green energy" policies empower China at American expense.
Elizabeth Nickson looked into another war altogether — the one Team Biden are waging on farming.
No Farmers, No Food, No Future
And now bugs. They are actually serious about bugs, and when I say ‘they’ I mean the government. Justin Trudeau, the most hated man in Canada, and the most hated prime minister in history granted millions to yet another bug factory not too long ago. This venture is so unpopular, some wit created an app that scans a food product to see whether bugs are being used.
Bugs and chemical meats are meant to replace meat, dairy and eventually, grains and vegetables. Like the vaccines, given the recent history of government institutions meant to assure safety, there is substantial doubt as to safety or efficacy, but never mind. It is part of the great green future, where we will live in concrete bunkers piled on top of each other and eat meat paste and crickets. A contractor friend building four badly needed high rises in the near-by capital city, claims there is so much green regulation wicking away money, they are limited to low-ceilinged bunkers, with tiny windows.
This is all allegedly to lower the methane released by humans, meat birds, pork and cattle, to reduce the use of nitrogen in fertilizers. Since provisions of the Green New Deal were included in the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the Biden administration has gone full bore into regulatory rule-making. Rule-making is surreptitiously powerful and generally goes ignored by any media, since few journalists have done time in the real world of actual production of actual goods that people need to eat.
But that rule-making is now methodically shuttering independent farmer after rancher after farmer. Ranches that have fed people for a century or more are having their herds reduced from six hundred head of cattle to one hundred, without any ability to discuss or work with the Bureau of Land Management official who is ruining them. A proposed new rule gives Bureau of Land Management employees even more power, without any legislative oversight.
Legislators, national, state-wide and local, cannot keep up with the number of food-producing businesses being destroyed. The tactics are fiendish and destructive. The biggest dam removal in history is about to happen in the Klamath, despite the fact that the second biggest dam removal did not bring back the Coho salmon. There is no rigour within the cadres destroying America. Their science is rubbish, the fruits of their work, demonic.
At the G20 two weeks ago in New Delhi, the conference issued a joint statement endorsing the 30 percent goal “to achieve land degradation neutrality.” Farming is now considered land degradation. Last week, Biden announced the creation of a “Climate Corps” styled after the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration, which will employ a corps of formerly unemployed fanatics patrolling any productive operation for "climate crimes." This is so dystopian it is hard to believe. But it’s true.
Peter Smith checked in on some of his mathematically challenged countrymen, specifically those in charge of the government.
To 'Climate' Cultists, Arithmetic Is Passé
Earlier this year Westinghouse announced that its 300 MW small modular reactor (SMR), would cost around US $1 billion; and, when the time needed for meeting regulatory requirements and for construction was taken in account, could be operational in the U.S. by 2033. In the meantime, back at the ranch: Australia’s obsessively anti-nuclear, pro-wind and sun, minister for climate change and energy, Chris Bowen, said that replacing all of Australia’s remaining fleet of coal power stations would require 71 SMRs and would cost A$387 billion; about US$257 billion. Shock horror!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that those on the left of the political spectrum are not too fond of arithmetic. Arithmetic is annoyingly consistent and doesn’t bend with the wind or with the agenda. It can be an informative aid in understanding the relative benefits and costs of particular courses of action. Robert Conquest comes to mind; specifically, his first law. Here it is:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. [Or, if you like] “Everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows something about."
Sensing the truth of this law, those on the left cloak themselves in ignorance and mysticism lest their grand visions fall apart in their own utopian minds. Thus, for example, in Bowen’s mind 71 SMRs at the cost of $1 billion each becomes $257 billion in total. Does he concern himself that his arithmetic is awry? Not a bit. That would mistake the man’s politics. He has no interest in discovering the truth. He has a narrative to push. However, this time, his hyperbolic costing of nuclear energy misses its mark. Rather like Dr. Evil’s out-of-touch ransom demand of (gasp) one million dollars.
And Tom Finnerty contributed a blog post on Bill Gates’s attempt to reset his side’s approach to “climate change,” and whether it will be successful.
Bill Gates Adjusts his Green-Tinged Glasses
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming pieces at The Pipeline!