Words, words, words; Bugs, bugs, bugs; and Democrats' desperate deflection.
In his editor’s column this week, Michael Walsh revisited a key theme from his 2017 best seller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, namely the modern, Marcusian Left’s strategic redefinition of words to further their revolutionary aims.
Zero Tolerance for 'Tolerance'
Everyone's heard this joke: In Heaven the French are the cooks, the Germans are the engineers, the British are the police, the Swiss are the managers, and the Italians are the lovers; in Hell, the British are the cooks, the French are the managers, the Italians are the engineers, the Germans are the police, and the Swiss are the lovers.
It's a fine collection of stereotypes, and of course almost every bit of it, generally speaking, is true. That's what makes it funny. It might also make it "offensive," but who cares? If you can't take a joke, go home and play with the stuffed animals in your safe space. One of the things that has gotten America into such cultural and moral trouble is the Left's ability to seize and transform words into what they would like them to mean, instead of what they actually do mean. So powerful has this movement been, so successful, that perfectly innocent words like "stereotype"—and morally positive words such as "discriminating"— have taken on an entirely negative connotation, while formerly negative terms such as "tolerance" have instead been elevated to cardinal virtues.
It's time to put a stop to this degradation and weaponization of our language, which is now the cause of so much misunderstanding between the two sides of the cultural-political battles for America's soul. Time and again, conservatives have fallen victim to the fallacy that the Left's vocabulary and ours are identical. They are not: the words may be superficially the same, but they have (of course) radically different meanings. And until the Right realizes this, the restorative war cannot be won.
Let's start with "tolerance," one of the most culturally dangerous words in the Left's vocabulary. It's often combined with such other expanded weasel words as "diversity" and employed as a Critical Theory cudgel against the larger culture in order to "push boundaries" and "break barriers." The object, of course, being the destruction of historic norms and the ushering in of a new age of moral anarchy in the name of "righting wrongs." ….
[Recall] that the Latin root for our word "tolerance" is tolerantia—its gender, by the way, is feminine—which means "endurance, the ability to bear pain or adversity; patience, fortitude." In no way does it signify indifference to a given person, place, thing, or situation or, worse, approval. A "tolerant" society is one that is under mortal attack; and, with the perversion of the definition, is effectively prevented from fighting back. A "tolerant" society is a defenseless society and thus a doomed society….
The first step, therefore, in confronting the modern Left is to reject their transmogrification of the language and insist that words retain their original meaning. As with everything else they touch, words have become distorted and misshapen simulacrums of their former selves, used now not to communicate but to browbeat and propagandize. Such a situation has now become intolerable.
Joan Sammon contributed a piece examining the disingenuous attempts by Democrats in Congress and the White House to frame elevated oil prices as being either a product of corporate greed or Vladimir Putin’s disruption of the market.
The 'Putin Price Hike' Show Flops in D.C.
The House Committee on Energy & Commerce has held hearings on high gas prices, known as downstream prices, to which they invited upstream oil and gas industry executives to testify. While certainly not worthy of any Broadway accolades, the theatrics were nonetheless on full display. Missing only a marquee, the hearings were even given a name: "Gouged at the Gas Station: Big Oil and America’s Pain at the Pump." The dramatic title and alliterations aside, the event was a bust.
Led by Chairman, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the upstream oil executives were one by one peppered with disingenuously framed questions regarding the industry and questions steeped in innuendo intended to buttress the most recent White House narrative about high retail gas prices. Instead of the administration unwinding what has proven to be an expensive and dangerous energy policy, the White House and congressional members have doubled down on their assertion that upstream oil and gas producers are gouging consumers. But there’s a problem. It simply isn't true.
Oil and gas producers have no control over the prices for which gasoline is sold at the downstream consumer level. It’s like blaming the owner of a gold mine for the price of jewelry. It’s a fundamentally flawed assertion, and something that Pallone certainly understands because there are refineries, part of the down stream segment of the industry, currently operating in New Jersey, the state he represents. As Chevron CEO Mike Wirth noted: “We do not control the market price for crude oil or natural gas or refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel.”
Had congressional representatives even a modicum of intellectual honesty, they would’ve described the energy industry, like most industries, as multi-faceted. The upstream segment, made up of exploration, drilling and production, focuses on finding and extracting oil and gas from out of the ground. The midstream segment encompasses facilities and processes--think processing, storage and transportation via pipelines, rail, tankers and trucks. Finally, the current bane of the White House's existence is the downstream segment. This includes refining, marketing, transporting, and selling refined products made from crude oil. Downstream products are used globally and include gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, and asphalt, among many other products.
The administration is attempting to conflate the activities and prices downstream with the activities of upstream companies and the executives that lead them. While related, neither segment controls the other, and all are needed in order for consumers to enjoy full access to the products and services that make up the U.S. economy.
Since Russia’s advance into Ukraine, the administration has floated a series of narratives attempting to explain away the high prices of oil and gas, including gasoline. While White House and congressional surrogates have offered tips ranging from, "buy electric vehicles" to "it’s the Putin’s price hike," they have failed to make headway with adult Americans. They tried spoon-feeding the Putin narrative to TikTok teenage influencers who, not unsurprisingly, ended up being more interested in Ukrainian-themed emojis than energy policy.
The American people, it turns out, have refused to swallow any of these explanations, fully understanding that downstream gas prices aren’t set by upstream executives, and that prices began rising for all sectors of the economy shortly after Biden took office, not merely six weeks ago when Russians entered Ukraine. The "gouging" narrative is merely the latest effort to deflect from the costly reality the administration’s own energy policy have created for Americans.
When Biden took office, he began manipulating the supply of domestic energy through regulatory overreach, including most recently via the Security Exchange Commission (SEC). Using the dubious, "environment, social and governance" standard known as "ESG," and with assistance from investment bank Goliaths who are divesting from the industry, domestic energy production has been impeded by the Biden administration directly. Its efforts have resulted in supply scarcity driving up the cost of energy for business and consumers alike. The average national retail (downstream) price of a gallon of gas on April 9, stood at $4.12 per gallon. Because of the changes Biden has made to domestic energy policy since taking office, prices are approximately 45.32 percent higher than a year ago.
Speaking of ESG, here’s Tom Finnerty with a blog post on the danger it poses to state pension funds, which are already dangerously underfunded. He also contributed pieces on Energiewende and wind power, the latter of which is excerpted below.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Wind Power
Great news for the climate crowd: For the first time ever, wind successfully generated more energy than coal and nuclear! The Watermelons must be so proud!
Still, they might not want to break out the party hats quite yet. As the statement above makes clear, this milestone only accounts for a single day of power generation. A particularly windy day, no doubt. Which is to say, it is right in line with the intermittency problem energy realists often bring up in debates with wind enthusiasts. Sure, it's fun to go outside with your pinwheel on a windy day. But when the wind isn't blowing it's no fun at all.
And when your pinwheel is as tall as the Statue of Liberty and you're expecting it to power your energy grid, you end up in a tough spot. That's what Europe discovered earlier this year, when energy prices went crazy because the normally stormy North Seas remained preternaturally calm all season.
And even beyond that, there's a certain sleight-of-hand going on throughout this announcement. It purposefully conflates the amount of energy actually generated by wind with wind "capacity." So: "U.S. wind power capacity installation has soared in recent years to the point where wind capacity exceeded nuclear capacity in September 2019" and "wind power ranks as the third-largest source of generating capacity." The significance of this is made plain as you read on:
Despite surpassing nuclear capacity more than two years ago, wind still generated less electricity than nuclear because the two technologies differ in their utilization. The average capacity factor of U.S. wind generators was 35 percent in 2021, much lower than the average capacity factor of nuclear generators, 93 percent in 2021. Nuclear generators are designed to run at or near full output, which they typically do.
So while wind capacity has skyrocketed in recent ("Yay!" say the Greens), it still generates less electricity than nuclear power, which produces a reliable stream of power against which wind turbines can't compete.
Rich Trzupek wrote on the administrative state’s assault on the American character.
Drinking, Drowning From the Regulatory Firehose
Recently, I had occasion to speak with a friend who works for the E.P.A. He commented on the changes in his job under the current Administration using this phrase: “we’re being asked to drink from a firehose.” Within the context of the conversation, the meaning of his message was clear. It wasn’t a complaint as much as it was a compliment. Whereas the Trump administration had chocked down hard on the plumbing of environmental regulation, the Biden administration has opened the stopcocks as fully as possible. “Drinking from a firehose,” from my friend’s point of view, was a metaphorical way of saying that my friend would never lack for something to do under the Biden administration.
I do not begrudge my friend his choice of making a living, Nor do I begrudge him a particular world-view that may – in a particular opinion – place unintended and unearned weight on propositions I believe to be at least somewhat faulty. My friend may be right in part or in whole, just as I may be. My personal obligation as a member of the human community is to constantly and objectively re-assess what I believe to be the truth and to relate the truth as I understand it to be as clearly and concisely as possible, without resorting to personal animus, unless of course resorting to animus elicits a cheap laugh or two.
Broadly-speaking, Donald Trump’s political opponents in both politics and the press defined Trumpism’s attitude toward the entrenched bureaucratic class as both assault and battery. In the case of the government’s role in environmental protection, Democrats and their mainstream media allies essentially painted Trumpism in colors that were certainly not reliable shades of green, but were decidedly smears of a soiled, brownish hue. According to them, President Trump did not really want to restore some balance to the entirely worthy propositions of environmental protection and economic equity, which is essentially how he and his supporters defined their mission in these areas. Instead, the President’s opponents insisted that he was determined to sabotage the supposedly fragile purity of the environment in order to supposedly protect sordid, favored economic interests.
When dealing with this and virtually any other part of what has become known as “the swamp” of the entrenched ruling class, the ultimate message of Trumpism is to say: “bureaucrats, know thy proper place!” Biden, or more likely Biden’s handlers, have replied with an angry, more defiant message: “Bureaucrats, assume Thy Rightful Place!”
And finally, here’s David Cavana discussing Bill Gates’ obsession with you adding bugs to your diet and cutting out the beef.
Bugs: They're What's for Dinner
A billowing concern of some on the left is the exhalation of CO2 and the expelling of methane by cows. The Klimate Kult is concerned by the effect of cow burps and farts on the oft-disproved “greenhouse” effect and the warming of the planet. Keep in mind that even if the planet is warming (and no uncorrupted global temperature data supports this), scientists are looking for a planet about five degrees C warmer than earth for future human habitation because a warmer planet has more food, less extreme weather and is a better home for humanity.
The solution to cow flatulence by some, including Bill Gates, the owner of more privately-owned farmland in the United States than anyone else, is for us to eat insects instead of food. Let’s say we replace food with bugs. To appease the Klimate Kult. To pretend against all evidence that Anthropogenic Global Warming exists. To signal our virtue to the universe. How many insects would we need to eat to replace beef... real food?
We would need to slaughter around 363,000 crickets to get the same number of calories that comes from one slaughtered cow. But we slaughter 1.5 billion cows every single year, meaning that to get the same number of calories that we get from all the cows we slaughter would mean around 550 trillion crickets would need to be slaughtered instead.
[I]t would be basically impossible to quantify how many insects would need to be killed to replace the other 70 billion land animals, and around 1.2 trillion marine animals, that are currently killed for animal products every single year.
But there's a problem. Something of which many are unaware, evidently, is that insects feel pain. Those same folks asking (demanding?) we reduce the human population of the planet to save it, are worried about the moral considerations of killing bugs. Oh, the humanity:
[I]n the case of crickets, they have been shown to react to receiving morphine, staying in a box that was getting progressively hotter for a longer period than the crickets who were not given morphine. After five days of being given morphine, they even started exhibiting signs of addiction when they were no longer given the opiate.
So whilst scientific knowledge on insect sentience is still in its early days, what we already know about these animals makes their lives morally valuable, and makes creating a system that would end up slaughtering an entirely incomprehensible number of them, a serious moral concern that we are ethically obligated to avoid.
Hmm… And how do we feed and water 550,000,000,000,000 crickets? And house them in such a way that they are healthy and that they successfully reproduce? And care for their pupae? And dispose of the waste of half-a-quadrillion crickets? How many concrete (which releases CO2) buildings would need to be built for housing and nurseries and abattoirs for these bugs? What would be the impact to waterways of this huge amount of concentrated waste?
What would be the electrical cost of maintaining an insect habitat for hundreds of trillions of insects? Would the carbon footprint of these huge bugatoriums be larger than that of the food they are “replacing?” Does anyone know? It’s vanishingly rare for the left to do a cost-benefit calculation on their various emotional cults.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Steven F. Hayward, David Solway, Peter Smith, and a cartoon by Roman Genn. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!