The House Always Wins; SBF's ESG-Ponzi Scheme; & Jail Time for Home Heating?

In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh implores the Republican Party to wake up and realize what kind of game it is currently playing.

The Sting

If you knowingly sit down at a fixed poker game and lose your entire stash, would you also complain that some of the other players also cheated? If it was a friend who brought you into the game, would you then go to another one with him? And having lost all your money when you bet the farm, would you re-mortgage it and bet it all again on the chance that this time things would be different? If you're a Republican, the answer is: of course you would, because you just did and you're about to do it again.

If the national elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022 didn't teach the GOP a lesson or three, what will? From Donald Trump's surprise (though not a surprise to me) win in 2016, it's been mostly all downhill for the party of Lincoln, which has been thrice set back on its heels and sent to the power poorhouse. The day after Trump's election, the institutional Left launched its legal coup against Trump and as early as mid-February 2017 had claimed its first and most important scalp in Mike Flynn, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried during the Obama administration. Saddled with hostile incompetents such as Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration was kneecapped by its own naivete and betrayed by its two deadliest enemies, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, the twin vipers known around the West Wing as "the Democrats." By the time Trump was goaded by them and the media into firing Steve Bannon, the man who got him elected, MAGA was finished as a philosophical and governing force in the Oval Office. The rest, as they say, was commentary.

So from a position of power in January 2017, when the GOP under Trump held the White House and both branches of Congress; to the 2018 mid-terms, when Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi, the pride of Baltimore, took over the House and unleashed not one but two impeachments against Trump; to the disaster of 2020, when the Trump forces refused to take the re-election campaign seriously and instead substituted supererogatory rallies in place of a brass-knuckles ground game; to the most recent congressional elections, in which the GOP barely recaptured the House but blew the Senate again, it's been one disaster after another. Why, it's almost been as if the fix has been in the whole time!

It's not like there was no warning. Once the Democrats miraculously cleaned out the GOP in formerly red Orange County, Calif., in 2018 it should have been clear even to such notable dummies as Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy that the game was no longer being played on Game Day, but weeks and even months before, plus a few days after the polls had "closed." Early voting, "harvested" voting, "absentee" voting was a Tammany wet dream come to life: who doesn't like their chances on Election Day when more than half the votes are already in the bag and you know to an absolute certainty where they went? Add to this the unconstitutional changes to the voting laws rammed through in blue states during the Covid hoax, and the Dems were in the catbird seat long before Nov. 8.

The old joke used to be that the dead vote was critical in Democratic precincts but now this could literally be true, since the votes of dead people could already be in the can, not to mention the candidates themselves, well before election day. This is why, in the final weeks before the vote, the Democrats were exuding (in Mark Twain's famous words) "the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces." Polls? We don't need no stinkin' polls! Besides, why have a traditional one-man, one-day election—a binding snapshot in time—when you can have a permanently floating crap game, one in which you're always ahead no matter when it stops?

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Walsh also blogged about Klaus Schwab’s speech at the B-20 meeting in Indonesia.

'I've Really Put You Through a Lot, Haven't I?'

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Clarice Feldman wrote about Sam Bankman-Fried, and his ESG-ponzi scheme

From Ether to Gold to Dross

Of all the tales of the spectacular collapse of FTX Crypto Exchange and its cautionary fate, nothing is as amusing as how Sam Bankman-Fried, the slobbish-looking CEO and Democrat Party benefactor who founded the now-bankrupt firm once "valued" at $32 billion, admits he used ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) fans to manipulate investors into funding his Bahamian-based Ponzi scheme. From the Wall Street Journal:

Hedge funds, venture-capital firms and other professional investors earn billions of dollars of fees for their purported skill in judging the potential of businesses and the integrity of their managers. Yet dozens of the world’s leading investment firms, including Sequoia Capital, Singapore’s state-owned investment company Temasek, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, SoftBank Group Corp., and hedge funds Third Point and Tiger Global, showered SBF with money. Despite their vaunted investing expertise, these firms all missed the many red flags fluttering high above FTX. And seldom in financial history have red flags been redder than this.

The product was hard to understand, the books of its trading affiliate, Alameda Research, were never audited. The leaders lacked any discernible expertise or moral compass. And yet suckers couldn't wait to give them their money.

Many public entities lost a lot by investing in FTX. The Missouri Employees’ Retirement Fund lost about one million dollars. The private equity firm who had them invest in the company was BlackRock, the biggest fan of ESG investing. The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Fund is writing down ninety-five million in "investments" it made in FTX. (No mention of whom it used to place this wild bet.) In the meantime Bankman-Fried admits ESG was a big part of his promotions:

Mr. Bankman-Fried virtue-signaled by committing to make FTX “carbon neutral” and donating generously to fashionable progressive causes such as a foundation working to provide solar energy in the Amazon River basin. “We’re giving millions each year to launch sustainability related initiatives,” he said in an April Forbes magazine interview with—you can’t make this up—Brazilian super-model Gisele Bündchen.

The reason he did was to keep regulators from looking too closely at his virtue-signaling, booming company. Meanwhile, he was leveraging FTX customer funds to make risky, ill-timed bets. It worked (until it cratered) with ESG rating organizations such as Truvalue ESG scoring it even higher than Exxon Mobil on “leadership and governance.”

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Rich Trzupeck contributed a piece about the smoke-and-mirrors Leftists use to justify massive changes to our way of life, with LED lighting and EVs among the most obvious examples.

Concerning the Great Elec-Trick

Replacing incandescent lightbulbs in the United States with LEDs and other technologies that were more energy efficient was supposed to fight climate change by reducing electrical consumption and thus reducing the amount of fossil-fuel electricity generated and thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil-fuel combustion. I doubt the actual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions associated with this program was in the millions on a net basis, since incandescent bulbs generated measurable and useful heat the LEDs do not. But it really doesn’t matter, because when you’re dealing with emissions in the billions of tons per year, a million tons here or there is hardly a blip on the radar.

We’re at the same point with the latest panacea: electric vehicles. Like LED light-bulbs, electrics will save the planet, at least according to dopey reporters and politicians. It’s a toss up whether electric vehicles are a net environmental benefit, however one feels about the "climate change" issue. You have to draw some pretty small boxes in order to make the case.  One box must encompass the electric vehicle alone, specifically its lack of a tailpipe. Without a tailpipe environmentalists can congratulate themselves for not directly introducing any air pollutants into the environment whilst cruising about town. The fact that the ultimate source of the energy involves a lot of fossil fuel combustion seems not to matter, or at least not nearly so much as it mattered during the Great Light Bulb Reformation.

Nor does the tiny box consider all of the other environmental consequences associate with going electric. This includes items such as the cost of mining and refining the metals needed to make high capacity batteries, the amount of energy needed to do so, and the difficulty of disposing of the batteries when they reach the end of their useful life.

Embracing electric vehicles also necessitates a fanatical belief that unilateral action by America can significantly influence the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We cannot. Moving to electric vehicles, as it appears we are determined to do, will have no measurable effect on global greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve reduced so much that further reductions hardly matter. The future use of fossil fuels and the effect of their use on the environment is a discussion that involves China and India alone. Everyone else is merely a bystander.

For example, the once sane state of California recently passed a law that will ban the sale of gasoline powered vehicles within its borders starting in 2035. The California Air Resources Board praised the measure, saying “the proposal will substantially reduce air pollutants that threaten public health and cause climate change.” What exactly constitutes “substantial” reductions? After poking about the Energy Information Administration (EIA) a bit, it appears that making California all electric is pretty inconsequential from an environmental point of view, even if it can be done, which is very doubtful.

The law does not outlaw driving gasoline powered vehicles in the state, it merely bans their sales within the state. Like most draconian measures it’s unlikely that the ban will do much to change the mix of vehicles on the road, it will merely shift where people who chose to drive gasoline powered vehicles purchase them. Automobile dealerships in Oregon, Nevada and Arizona ought to send thank you notes to Sacramento.

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And Lisa Schiffren wrote about the pointlessness of that modern environmentalist sacrament, recycling.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

On Tuesdays the garbage is collected in my neighborhood. Local apartment buildings make sure to put out their trash early. So when I walk my dog, we often pass large masses of see-through plastic trash bags, with their neatly sorted plastic contents, washed and bundled to be recycled. My neighbors are quite fastidious, as are their building superintendents. The effort to recycle takes significant time and effort, and no one skimps on it.

Different trucks pick up different types of trash, and take it to different places, naturally. This is expensive. But New York City has mandated recycling, to be environmentally correct, and help save the planet by re-using juice containers, water bottles, and all the rest of the plastic that holds stuff we want. But what if it turned out that this effort is entirely in vain? That it is a charade? A religious ritual to expiate the sin of consuming things in a wealthy, modern society?

As a matter of fact, it does turn out that all this effort and expense amounts to nothing, environmentally. In a widely circulated paper released on October 24th, no less an authority on environmentalism than radical Greenpeace announced that recycling plastic is a total sham, of tiny value. There is no such thing as recycling most of that plastic.

U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled. The report also finds that no type of plastic packaging in the U.S. meets the definition of recyclable used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy (EMF NPE) Initiative. Plastic recycling was estimated to have declined to about 5–6% in 2021, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.

The report finds that actual plastic recycling is down from a 2014 high of 9.5 percent to a 2021 low of 5-6 percent. Most of that plastic is “recycled” in China, and other poor Asian countries, to which we export it, at great cost. We pay them to recycle it, and we have no idea what they actually do with it. In fact, Greenpeace reports, most of it is dumped, though it is “counted” as recycled. For a lot less taxpayer money we could put it in landfills right here.

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Tom Finnerty blogged about the increasingly authoritarian nature of governments, both Eastern and Western, in approaching the world’s on-going energy crisis. Of course, never acknowledged is the the roll that those same governments played in creating the crisis in the first place.

Big Brother's Heating & Cooling Service

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And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, waits for an Uber.

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Hailing

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Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Peter Smith, Joan Sammon, and Tom Finnerty. And, once again, don’t forget to order our book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. You won’t regret it! All this and more this week at The Pipeline!