Ukraine; Modeling; and Grade School Propaganda
Ukraine; Modeling; and Grade School Propaganda
Enemies of the People: Harry and Meghan
Michael Walsh’s Editor’s Column this week untangled some of the historical background to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
'Not Worth the Bones of a Single Grenadier'
Otto von Bismarck, Germany's Iron Chancellor and the man who united most of the German states into a unified Second Reich in the second half of the 19th century, once famously observed that Der ganze Balkan ist nicht die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen pommerschen Grenadiers wert. "The entire Balkans aren't worth the sound bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." The joke being that a) the Balkans had always been an intractable mess and always would be, b) Pomerania itself had a long history of being conquered and reconquered by Prussians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Swedes, and Pomeranians were regarded as lousy soldiers, and c) a Pomeranian is a breed of small yipping dog.
Bismarck was right about the Balkans, but he might as well have been speaking of the Ukraine, a troubled land (its name means "borderland"), oft-conquered, rarely independent, generally restive, and almost always miserable. Like the Kurds, the Ukrainians are for reasons of geography basically a people without a country, long dominated by Russia both in its czarist and Soviet incarnations; indeed, Russians regard the Ukrainian capital of Kiev as an essential part of the Motherland, celebrated in both architecture and music by Viktor Hartmann and Modest Mussorgsky:
The Ukraine won its independence after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. As part of the deal, the Ukrainians were persuaded/coerced by Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, among other signatories to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, to surrender the nuclear weapons stationed on their soil. The key point for Russia was that the Ukraine, as a buffer state between itself and the West, should never be allowed to threaten the Russian homeland. The Russians, with their tenuous hold on a vast continental empire, the biggest nation on Earth, have long memories of foreign (particularly Teutonic) invasions that stretch well before Napoleon won his pyrrhic victory at Borodino and then had to retreat from a burning Moscow, destroying the Grande Armée. The idea was that Russia wouldn't threaten its former Warsaw Pact states and in return NATO wouldn't edge up to Russia's borders.
The West, of course, welshed on the deal, and has gradually been impressing other satellite countries near Russia's western border into the service of a now-explicitly anti-Russian (as opposed to anti-Soviet, as it was formerly). North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, more recently, the military powerhouses of Montenegro and North Macedonia. More are likely on their way, including Finland and Sweden, historically both enemies of Russia. The Ukraine clearly wishes to join NATO as well, especially latterly, under its president Vladimir Zelensky—but at the moment is prevented from doing so by among other things a law passed under its own former government in 2010.
The biggest cheerleaders for the Ukraine in the current war have turned out to be, surprise, Joe Biden and his always-wrong, America Last foreign policy establishment, headed by secretary of state Anthony Blinken, a retread from both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Biden and his noxious family have long used the Ukraine—the most corrupt country in Europe—as their personal piggybank and money laundromat, and in the recent past he has openly boasted about his ability to legally blackmail Ukrainian officials into doing his bidding. His word as a Biden!
Peter Smith contributed a piece about the Australian government’s infallible economic modeling.
'We Stand by the Modeling'
The Australian Labor Government, in office since May 23, is pinning its hopes and our very future on its plan: “Powering Australia.” Worried? Don’t be. It’s backed by modelling:
A Labor Government will close the yawning gap between our current Federal Government and our business community, agricultural sector and state governments when it comes to investing in the renewables that will power our future. Our plan will create 604,000 jobs, with 5 out of 6 new jobs to be created in the regions. It will spur $76 billion of investment. It will cut power bills for families and businesses by $275 a year for homes by 2025, compared to today.
Recently, Chris Bowen, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy; or, as I like to put it, the minister for a contradiction in terms, was asked about the predicted $275 reduction in power bills for families. What did “today” mean he was asked. Is it literally today, which successive tomorrows will soon enough become, or is it when the plan was published before the election. A good question. Since the election power bills have risen by about 15 to 20 percent; by, roughly speaking, $275.
Eventually, after much pressing, Bowen and the government stuck to the prediction. Apparently, the prediction fell out of modelling and there is no gainsaying modelling. Here’s Anthony Albanese (Albo), the Prime Minister, in Parliament on 6 September. Overlook the tortured syntax.
I've said absolutely consistently from this dispatch box… that we stand by the modelling that we did… And what the modelling showed was that with our plan, which includes Rewiring the Nation, making sure that you make the grid 21st-century ready, if you actually enable renewables to fit into the energy grid through the integrated systems plan that's been developed by the Australian Energy Market Operator then what you will do is promote investment in renewables, which are the cheapest form of energy.
Ah, “we stand by the modelling.” Statistical modelling of the future. Something for which failure is endemic. Psychics do better. Thus, no economics model predicted the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. Hysterical morbidity modelling of the virus armed authoritarians. Kept people locked away, masked, forcibly injected with experimental substances. And, as everyone should know but doesn’t, climate models have performed abjectly; e.g., in falsely predicting increases in extreme weather events.
Models and complex reality occupy different universes. So why Albo’s touching faith in modelling renewables? To be clear. It’s not informed faith. It’s blind faith.
Once you set out your stall to achieve net-zero and announce the steps along the way, including an untenable promise to deliver 82 percent of electricity by renewables by 2030, realism is defenestrated. The imperative becomes how to make the infeasible feasible. Saviour required. Namely, modelling which says it can be done. Better still modelling which says it can be done more cheaply. What a turnup! Show me the wanted outcome (cheap and abundant green energy) and I’ll show you the model.
Tom Finnerty blogged about former Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers, and his ongoing attacks on the Biden Administration for its irresponsible and dangerous handling of the nation’s economy.
Lawrence Summers Goes After 'Greenflation'
Lawrence Summers is probably not getting invited to any Georgetown cocktail parties any time soon. Bill Clinton's former treasury secretary, who chaired the National Economic Council under Barrack Obama, has more recently developed into a thorn in the side of his own party's big spending Progressives, especially those in the Biden administration.
It began quite early on: in March of 2021, just two months after Joe Biden entered the White House, Summers slammed the president's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package as, "the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.” While sympathetic to "arguments for providing relief to those hurt by the economic fallout of the pandemic, investing in controlling the virus, and supporting consumer demand," Summers was clearly shocked by the degree to which "the policy discussion has not fully reckoned with the magnitude of what is being debated.” …
Much to the annoyance of his fellow liberals, Summers continued to prophesy the advent of serious inflation. And to their even greater annoyance— it was clearly a shot at Summers when Biden claimed "no serious economist" believes "there’s unchecked inflation on the way"—he kept being proved right.
As inflation numbers skyrocketed, Summers pivoted to arguing that the administration and Federal Reserve weren't doing enough to address the real problem. In particular, he worried about the Fed's comparatively small increases in interest rates being too little, too late. He suggested that this might be because the Fed "still believes that inflation is in fact transitory and that it will evaporate as supply chains are restored." For Summers, this line of thinking "never seemed plausible, given accelerating residential and wage inflation and room for acceleration in the costs of health care, airfare and lodging. It seems even less plausible today, with war in Ukraine and Covid lockdowns in Asia."….
Now the economist has begun to gesture at one of the key drivers of inflation, namely the significant increase in energy rates due to shortages at the point of consumption. “It’s kind of insane that we have truck and trains carrying oil all over this country, rather than constructing pipelines, which would permit accessing more resources and cheaper, safer transmission,” Summers told the Boston Globe’s Globe Summit earlier this month.
Clarice Feldman blogged about ESG and stock underperformance, which has been wreaking havoc in the world of pension/retirement funds.
Stein's Law Meets 'ESG' Investing
The California Public Employee’s Retirement System (CALPERS) which controls $444 billion in assets for the benefit of two million state public employees, retirees, and families is certainly putting Stein’s law to the test. For twelve years it has been using those assets contrary to sound fiduciary principles, choosing instead to purchase stocks based on the notion of companies’ ESG (social, environmental and governance ) practices. In 2010, it committed $500 million to such investments.
Oops.
Heather Gilbert in the Wall Street Journal reports the sad state of this new virtue signaling investment policy:
The nation’s largest pension fund got a scathing performance review Monday when its new investment chief highlighted the retirement system’s underperforming returns and estimated it missed out on $11 billion in gains during a “lost decade” for private equity.
The unusually candid presentation to board members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as Calpers, showed returns lagging behind other large pensions in almost every asset class during the past 10 years, with private equity trailing the most, 1.3 percentage points. ... We underperformed every one of our peers on the upside, all with the promise that when we got to the downside we would be better protected than other funds,” Terry Brennand, director of budget, revenue and pensions for the Service Employees International Union’s branches in California, said during the public comment portion of Monday’s investment committee meeting. Instead, “we continued to underperform our peers.”
As a matter of fact, more than just its private equity portfolio underperformed other large pension funds. Calpers ESG portfolio underperformed other large pension funds in stocks and income. But its officers seem to see no connection between these policies and the fund’s poor performance.
And Lisa Schiffren wrote about how the Great Reset is being incorporated into the American educational system.
Manipulating Our Kids for 'Social and Emotional' Purposes
It's now clear that a generation has been indoctrinated in the public schools to believe that gender is a fluid construct, and therefore children should be supported in mutilating their bodies to become the sex they prefer; that structural racism by whites against blacks is the overwhelming reality in America, requiring reverse racism to "fix’" things; and that climate change will doom life on earth in the next 30 years unless radical changes are made in Western society and the civilizational ethos undergirding it. We must give up fossil fuels, individualism, and free choice in favor of decisions by unelected elites about energy resources.
All of this figures in the “Great Reset.” It constitutes a radicalization of America, and a repudiation of our national values. It’s worth asking, how was this accomplished in a school day in which reading, math, and science needed to be taught? The answer is that the subject matter curriculum – environmental science, for instance – was changed. But to really indoctrinate children, the lessons had to go deeper than any mere science course could manage.
The major delivery system for the trans/Critical Race Theory/"climate change" agendas is a curriculum called Social and Emotional Learning – SEL for short, which is now pervasive in American classrooms. The concept was invented in the late 1960s by James Comer, a Yale Professor of education, to help children at a low-achieving, ghetto school in New Haven to acquire some social and self-management skills that their impoverished, poorly educated parents could not impart, the theory being that this would help with academic achievement.
It worked. By the late 1980s the original target schools were scoring much higher on standardized tests, as students learned emotional self-regulation and how to get along with others by building healthy relationships.
So, naturally, SEL spread. And morphed. Starting in 1994, left-wing education foundations adopted it. These days it is found in schools across the country – all 50 states have adopted it for at least some students. As has the world; SEL went wholly woke on race after 2020, and has spread like wildfire since the Covid closures ended. Many of its pedagogical goals are embedded in, and therefore measured by, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It has become a great deal more invasively therapeutic even as it has edged out traditional, straightforward pedagogy by which teachers convey subject matter to students.
The conservative critique is that SEL is moral education without reference to either traditional Judeo-Christian principles or traditional Western values. That is, morality without God and political ideology that negates individualism, personal freedoms, and capitalism. In particular, it uses an overemphasis on empathy to inculcate new values. Naturally not all parents want the state teaching morals and values to their children, especially where the school version will conflict with what parents teach at home. According to Kimberly Ells, writing in The Federalist, it “displaces parents as transmitters of values; pushes social learning ahead of substance; instills ‘pluralistic thinking’; aligns with global, not local or national goals.”
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by David Cavena, Clarice Feldman, and Joan Sammon. And don’t forget to pre-order our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!