Month: October 2022

Liz Truss lasted about three Scaramuccis as prime minister of the United Kingdom before she resigned on Thursday. Her sin was fairly simple. She introduced an economic plan that was designed to satisfy libertarian think tanks and fans of Ronald Reagan rather than anything workable. This kind of nonsense can pass muster in the United States thanks to the U.S. Dollar being the world’s reserve currency, which means we can seemingly go as far into debt as we want without the markets panicking. The U.K. doesn’t have that luxury, so there’s a limit to how many favors they can do to the fabulously wealthy.

Truss was ousted by her own party because her ideological overplay was looking likely to end the Conservative party as a viable operation. Surveys indicated that hundreds of Tory members of Parliament could lose in the next election, whenever that might be held, and so they took swift action to protect themselves. They might still suffer that grim fate, but at least they didn’t walk like lambs to the slaughter.

It would be nice if two things that seem to function in the United Kingdom also worked in the United States. First and foremost, the people could really punish the Republicans when they fuck up and tank the economy. I don’t mean by simply electing a Democratic president, as they did in 1992 and 2008 when the economy turned sour. I mean by scores of safely conservative seats suddenly going bright blue because people realize the GOP is run by incompetent ideologues who are bringing the country to ruin. It looks like something closer to the opposite is about to happen, and then we’ll have Trussites running half our government.

Secondly, it would be nice if Republicans would toss out leaders who are transparently incompetent instead of rallying around them and lowering the standard of acceptable leadership and performance in office. The reason they don’t, I suspect, is because nothing can touch them in their safe seats except someone even more extreme from their right flank.

I will say this, though. If anything can get Joe Biden reelected, it’s a Republican-led Congress in 2023 and 2024. They will do all they can to fuck things up just as thoroughly as Liz Truss screwed the pooch in Britain, and then it just becomes a matter of if they’ll ever get blamed for it. It worked for Harry Truman in 1948 and Bill Clinton in 1996, and I could see it working again for Biden. Or not.

Technically it is still midweek, even if for just a few more moments. Here’s an under-rated post-punk classic. I probably saw this video for the first time on one of the UHF MTV knock-offs about a good two or three years after it was originally released. Better late than never.

Until next time, cheers!

Concerned that the national mood is shifting against the Democrats just in time for the critical midterm elections, President Biden made an appearance on Tuesday at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, and promised to protect reproductive rights. He committed to make his first priority next year signing a national law protecting legal access to abortion, but only if the Democrats in Congress have the power to pass the legislation. That won’t happen unless they keep their majority in the House and add a seat or two in the Senate. The latter scenario still seems possible, but the House is beginning to look like a lost cause.

Polling indicates people are worried about abortion access and also threats to democracy, but that they’re still preferring the Republicans because of the economy. The president theoretically has the power to put the focus back on more favorable turf in a way that individual candidates cannot, so it was a smart political move for the administration to make this effort.

The mood of the electorate is sour and unpredictable. Consider that the GOP has a chance to win the governor’s race in New York and the Democrats are almost starting to look modestly favored to win the governor’s race in Oklahoma. Both outcomes would still be surprising upsets, but that they’re even possibilities is telling.

There’s record turnout in Georgia’s first day of early voting which could be good news for the Democrats if it means they’re matching the energy level of the Republicans, but no one really knows, including the pollsters. Usually, the president’s party fares poorly in midterms because the opposition is more motivated, but it’s hard to know if that advantage will actually manifest this year.

In past midterms cycles, I’ve often made detailed predictions, and some years I’ve been very accurate, particularly in 2006 when I was off in the House by a single seat. In 2010, I was far too optimistic. This time around, I’m not even going to try. I honestly have no idea anymore. I’m just hoping, and I hope you’re not just sitting on your ass reading blogs but finding time to also pitch in locally and help. Things can really take a dark turn here very shortly, and I don’t even want to fully consider what could go wrong if its a bad election night.

Look, I’m not a doctor or virologist, so I’m just going to talk some common sense here and if I’m wrong you can point it out in the comments. My understanding is that, because it’s airborne, the communicability of COVID-19 depends on how much virus an infected person is exhaling into the environment. Another way of putting it is that the more virus you inhale, the less likely your immune system is to successfully fight off infection.

A vaccine helps your immune system do a more efficient job, but it doesn’t prevent you from inhaling virus. Usually, but not always, the vaccine prevents the virus from getting a foothold in your body, and that means it you aren’t going to be exhaling a lot of virus that might infect someone else. So, in this sense, being vaccinated makes it significantly less likely that you’ll help spread the virus.

Wearing a mask limits how much virus you inhale, and it also limits how much virus you put into the environment around you, so on both scores it helps limit the spread. Social distancing is another way you can minimize the sharing of virus.

In any case, COVID-19 vaccinations do not prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but they do have an powerful impact. Some of this is semantics. Does “prevent” mean “lessen” or does it mean “preclude”? There are things you can do to prevent forest fires, but there is nothing you can do to eliminate forest fires.

If you listen to Christoper Tremoglie of the Washington Examiner, however, you might think you’ve been lied to. In his version of events, the vaccination was promised as a way to eliminate the virus. And, worse, the pharmaceutical providers of the vaccines did not even test to see if it was effective in eliminating the virus before making them available. As evidence for this, he goes to Europe.

For months, the Left in the United States told us to get the vaccine to prevent transmission of COVID. The vaccine was touted as efficient, effective, and a key to saving lives because it stopped the virus from spreading. But last week, while giving testimony to the European Parliament, Pfizer executive Janine Small admitted that Pfizer did not test to determine whether the vaccine would prevent the spread of COVID. This admission debunked essentially everything the Left told people about vaccination and showed the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative was nothing but another Democratic lie.

“So, there are no misunderstandings: Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” Rob Roos, a European member of Parliament from the Netherlands, asked. “If not, please say it clearly. If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee? And I really want a straight answer, yes or no, and I’m looking forward to it.”

“No,” Small said. “We really had to move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”

Obviously, the vaccines were made available as soon as they were deemed reasonably safe, and I don’t think there’s any valid complaint about that. They immediately started saving lives by the hundreds of thousands. But they did not “stop” the virus from spreading (or mutating). In part this was because hundreds of millions of people didn’t get the vaccine either because they had some concern or objection, or because they couldn’t get their hands on them. In a perfect world where everyone was simultaneously inoculated with a perfectly up-to-date vaccine, it may have been possible to eradicate the virus entirely, but even that’s not certain since it’s transmits from animals to humans. That would have been our best chance, however.

So, is this justified?

Seemingly everything the Left promoted turned out to be misinformation. They criticized, shamed, and vilified those who resisted taking the vaccine. They mobilized people to believe a set of ideas that turned out not to be true.

The people who were so concerned with the importance of telling the truth from 2017-2020 had no problem promoting disinformation as long as it suited their political agenda. They (falsely) blamed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during the pandemic on people who did nothing to cause them. The Left stood on a soapbox and proudly asserted its moral superiority over those against taking the vaccine. But, it turns out, they were nearly all wrong.

The “get vaccinated to save lives” and “trust the science” mantras that dominated pandemic messaging for nearly two years turned out to be a farce. The people promoting the importance of trusting science showed exactly why we should all be skeptical of it.

I won’t dispute there was some confusion about what was being promised, or what was realistic anyway. But vaccines prevent the spread of COVID-19 and therefore save lives. The more people that are vaccinated, the more effective the vaccines are, and this did not need to be demonstrated in a study prior to making the vaccines available because it’s common sense.

Maybe the headline from the official White House website doesn’t sound all that exciting to you: “President Biden Designates Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument.” To be honest, I’m not from Colorado and I’ve never heard of Camp Hale. Maybe I’ll get to visit this new National Monument one day, but it’s not something that has some immediate and direct benefit for me. But it’s an underrated move by the Biden administration and one of the perqs of electing a Democratic president.

For starters, there’s more to it than indicated in the headline.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to protect, conserve, and restore our country’s iconic outdoor spaces and historical sites for the benefit of future generations, today President Biden signed a proclamation establishing the Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument. This action will honor our nation’s veterans, Indigenous people, and their legacy by protecting this Colorado landscape, while supporting jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy.

In addition, the Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and the Interior (DOI) announced a proposed withdrawal to protect the Thompson Divide in western Colorado, one of the state’s most cherished landscapes.

I was interested to learn that Camp Hale is where the 10th Mountain Division was established and trained to fight through the Alps in World War Two. Part of this move is intended to honor that history, as well as the history of the Ute tribe members who lived in the area prior to being pushed onto reservations.

But I got even more enthusiastic when I looked into what’s been going on in the Thompson Divide. I highly recommend reading this article from the last year of the Obama administration that explores the massive boon of oil and gas exploration the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and how the local communities have organized in response to protect the tourism industry.

It’s not just important for the livelihood of locals who work in the hunting, fishing and recreation industries. We’re talking about some of the most pristine and beautiful wilderness remaining in America. For the same reason Teddy Roosevelt set up the system of using the Antiquities Act to conserve the jewels of the American West, we should value what Biden has done here.

I’m going to mark this down and put it on my bucket list. I may not be interested in hunting elk or other big game that’s abundant in the Thompson Divide, but I might enjoy hiking or trout fishing there. And it’ll be nice if the trout is swimming in creeks not befouled by the oil and gas industry.

The White House has made that possible.

Today, DOI and USDA are also announcing steps to conserve the Thompson Divide area in western Colorado, one of the state’s most cherished landscapes. In response to broad concerns about protecting Thompson Divide’s important wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities, grazing lands and clean air and water, the administration is proposing a 20-year withdrawal of the Thompson Divide area from disposition under the public land laws, mining laws, and mineral and geothermal leasing laws, subject to valid existing rights.

This may seem like a small thing, but small things like this pile up and become a significant legacy. We should all stop and notice.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have repainted the castle. Note the heavy shadows. Those will be revised before I’m done.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.
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Conservative Iain Macleod, professional gambler and former editor of The Spectator, served as the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer for exactly one month in 1970 before he died of a heart attack. Kwasi Kwarteng lasted a little longer, 38 days. He was recalled by Prime Minister Liz Truss from a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, and sacked on Friday. It was an ignominious end to a brief and disastrous turn in charge of the country’s finances.

Truss and Kwarteng came into power less than six weeks ago as a package. It hasn’t gone well.

As the news broke that Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, had been fired on Friday, Britons on both sides of the political divide expressed dismay over Prime Minister Liz Truss’s first month in power and said that her leadership position looked increasingly untenable.

The son of Ghanian immigrants, Kwarteng is the first black Brit to serve his government in such a high position of responsibility. He first got attention writing columns for the right-wing rag The Daily Telegraph. From there he was set up as chairman of the right-wing think tank The Bow Group.

His fatal mistake as chancellor was immediate. Seventeen days into his term, he introduced “The Growth Plan 2022.” Quickly dubbed “the mini-budget,” it was typical Reagonomics. A plan to raise the corporate tax rate was scrapped. The high-end tax bracket of 45 percent was abolished. People receiving the Universal Credit social security payment were told to try harder to find work. It was basically what Republicans do every time they come to power in the United States. They deplete the government’s coffers and undermine the social safety net.

Except, forcing the United Kingdom to do massive deficit spending in the midst of inflationary pressures wasn’t what the doctor ordered. Nor was stimulating demand with tax cuts during a time of supply disruptions.

The budget, which was unveiled against the backdrop of a cost of living crisis, was immediately followed by a sharp fall in the value of pound sterling against the United States dollar as world markets reacted negatively to the increased borrowing that would be needed. By the next day of trading, the pound had hit an all time low against the US dollar. The statement drew widespread criticism from economists, some of whom feared its reliance on increased government borrowing to pay for the largest tax cuts in 50 years could lead to a situation like the 1976 sterling crisis when the UK was forced to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a financial bailout. The IMF took the unusual step of issuing an openly critical response to the budget, saying it would “likely increase inequality”.

Kwarteng’s proposals threw the British economy into crisis. It was as pure an example of blind ideology trumping sensible policy as I’ve ever seen. The ideas were so bad that they didn’t need to be implemented to cause damage. The mere suggestion that they might be implemented was sufficient.

The Bank of England had to engage in immediate triage.

The Bank of England has said it will step in to calm markets after the government’s tax-cutting plans sparked a fall in the pound and caused borrowing costs to surge.

It warned that if the market volatility continued there would be a “material risk to UK financial stability.”

The Bank will start buying government bonds at an “urgent pace” to help restore “orderly market conditions.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a one-size-fits-all political philosophy. It’s completely foreign to the supply-side ideologues to think there might be a good time to raise taxes or keep them the same. They don’t know when to goose the economy with stimulus to poor and middle wage earners, or how to tighten things up when demand outpaces supply. They complain about debt and deficit spending, but they deplete the government’s coffers at every opportunity without ever having the power or resolve to make corresponding (and unpopular) cuts that would balance the books.

It’s easier to get away with this in the United States than elsewhere, mainly because we have such a strong market for our bonds and can seemingly print as much money as we want. But also because our presidents serve for four-year terms and are not subject to recall or loss of confidence votes.  In the U.K., the Tories are already talking about replacing Truss as prime minister, just as they recently replaced Boris Johnson. The president of the United States can tank the economy without having to worry about being booted by their own party.

What’s happening in Britain is a perfect illustration of what’s what wrong with conservative economic theory.

Nikolas Cruz, the lunatic who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, has escaped the death penalty. The jury found that his crime warranted a death sentence, but also held that other factors mitigated against imposing it in this case. Many of the survivors in the courtroom cried as they realized that the person who showed no mercy to their loved ones would be spared, and I can certainly understand their frustration.

Cases like these, however, are the worst examples for considering whether we should have a death penalty or not. The senseless murder of children is among the least forgivable of crimes, and it’s hard to think of a better case for deterrence than the safety of our nation’s schools. Moreover, their is absolutely not on scintilla of doubt about Cruz’s guilt. Everything lines up here to impose the death penalty without any concern of wrongful conviction or disproportionate justice.

Nonetheless, the argument against the death penalty is mostly about how it functions in totality, not in the easiest cases. People have been put on death row and even executed despite being innocent. Others have avoided the death penalty only through good lawyering that is unavailable to those without a lot of resources. The only way to assure that these types of problems don’t persist is voluntarily forego the death penalty for all crimes. A wrongful conviction can be overturned, but it’s meaningless if the victim has been executed.

In Florida, a death penalty sentence requires unanimity from the jury, and at least one juror refused to go along in the Parkland case, presumably because they found the defense’s plea for mercy persuasive.

In laying out their defense, lawyers for Cruz presented testimony from counselors and a doctor who say the defendant suffers from a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a condition that they argued affects his reasoning and behavior. Witnesses testified that his birth mother, Brenda Woodard, had abused alcohol and cocaine while she was pregnant with him.

“You now know that Nikolas is a brain-damaged, broken, mentally-ill person, through no fault of his own,” Cruz’s lawyer, Melissa McNeil, stated in closing arguments. “He was literally poisoned in Brenda’s womb.”

Maybe it was simply death penalty-nullification. The jurors all agree pre-trial that they would follow the law, not their personal beliefs, in imposing a sentence. But maybe someone lied about that.

Or maybe they thought Cruz was somehow not responsible. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Cruz doesn’t deserve to live. We shouldn’t have to pay for his upkeep. But every time a death penalty case fails, for whatever reason, it’s a good thing. And I do think it’s a double-edged sword. Life in prison is no picnic, and death can be an easy way out. If Cruz has any conscience at all, spending decades behind bars will give him plenty of time to suffer from guilt. And, if not, he’ll suffer from confinement and the other depredations of imprisonment.

Some of the parents who are traumatized anew by this verdict may look back later and be grateful. Through their testimony and impact statements, they fought to end someone’s life. But since they failed, unlike Cruz, they will never have that on their conscience. And Cruz will have no rest.

Some mid-1990s Richard H. Kirk right as Cabaret Voltaire was ending (he’d revive the band name as a solo act just before his death).

See you next week. Cheers.

For the third time in the last decade, I’ve found it essential to familiarize myself with the Genoese-Mongol wars. This history is 600-800 years old but essential to understanding the Black Sea region and the development of Russia. When Russia illegally invaded Crimea in 2014, I discovered that my knowledge of late medieval history contained a big hole and I raced to fill it on.  I was back reviewing this history when the COVID-19 outbreak reached American shores in early 2020. That’s because the Black Plague spread to Western Europe from Crimea. Now I’m back again because I’m trying to master the true history of the region compared to Vladimir Putin’s idiosyncratic version.

Yale professor Timothy Snyder is wholly dismissive of Putin’s claims on Crimea and Southern Ukraine, mainly based on the fact that the region was not part of the original Kievan Rus’ state. But it goes deeper than that.

The Crimean Peninsula has been around for quite a long time, and Russia is a recent creation.  What Putin has in mind when he speaks of eternity and is the baptism of a ruler of Kyiv, Valdimar, in 988.  From this moment of purity, we are to understand, arose a timeless reality of Russian Crimea (and a Russian Ukraine) which we all must accept or be subject to violence.  Crimea becomes “holy.”

It takes time to recount even a small portion of the ways in which this is nonsensical.

Snyder attempts to provide a whirlwind history of the region and it’s helpful as an introduction to the topic. It’s important to know certain facts, like the longstanding Muslim and Mongol control of the peninsula (Russia’s influence in Crimea really begins during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796)), and that Josef Stalin forcibly relocated the indigenous population.

Stalin falsely portrayed the entire Crimean Tatar people as collaborators with the German occupation, and ordered that every single one of them be deported from their homeland.  (Putin’s practice of associating entire nations with the Nazis and then seeking to destroy them, as we see, has a tradition.)

In just three days in May 1944, the Soviet secret state police rounded up and forcibly deported 180,014 Crimean Tatars, most of them to Soviet Uzbekistan.

Perhaps if Putin dated Russia’s claims to Crimea and southern Ukraine on these more recent dates rather than on a 10th-Century baptism he’d have a less laughable argument. But as an American, I don’t find Snyder fully convincing. Catherine the Great died a mere four months before George Washington. We wouldn’t take it well if someone argued that the United States has no claim on Virginia because there’s a long history of human settlement that predates the U.S. Constitution. I don’t think most Russians care that the area was once a Mongol or Ottoman possession. It’s a matter of national pride that those rulers were driven out.

The world is filled with formerly powerful peoples and cultures now living as oppressed minorities, as well as many persistent border disputes. What brings order is an agreement to accept borders as they exist, or to engage in civilized negotiations where agreement is not possible. When Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union and Russia, Crimea came along for the ride for two simple reasons. First, Crimea had been assigned to the Ukraine SSR by the Soviet government.

Crimea had been an autonomous region thanks to the presence of the Crimean Tatars, which had been eliminated.  After the war, it was just a normal oblast, or region, of the Russian republic of the USSR.  It fell to Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, to decide what to do with the peninsula.  A decade after the mass deportation, the peninsula was transferred, at Khrushchev’s initiative, from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

Khrushchev’s motives were practical.  The connection with the Russian republic was a logistical and administrative nightmare.  There is no actual land connection to Russia, but there is to Ukraine.  Crimea could be sensibly supplied with water and with energy from the Ukrainian side.

This seems much more relevant than a 10th-Century baptism.

The second reason is that the people of Crimea voted to join Ukraine, albeit with less enthusiasm than the rest of the country.

After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, deported Crimean Tatars, or their children and grandchildren, made their way back to their homeland, which was now part of independent Ukraine.  Every single region of Ukraine voted for independence in a referendum that year, all of them by very wide margins: except Crimea.  In Crimea, the vote for Ukrainian independence was still positive — 54% — but this was thirty-six points below the overall national outcome, which was 90%.

Russia acceded to this arrangement, and that should be the end of the story.

It should also be remembered that the Ukrainian SSR was an original signatory to the United Nations charter, granting the USSR a second vote. In this sense, it has had an at least theoretical independence from Russia since the war.

The power of Putin’s claim to Ukraine doesn’t really rise or fall on some interpretation of history. It’s an appeal to Russia’s cultural pride and former power. The way we are supposed to handle these disputes begins with respect for the borders of all members of the United Nations in good standing. That’s where Putin’s actions are indefensible irrespective of any historical or cultural claims he might choose to make. It’s the same reason Saddam Hussein had no right to claim Kuwait for himself, even if he may have had some plausible grievances and historically rationalized territorial arguments. If this norm isn’t respected and enforced then war can break out in dozens of places around the globe.

Simply put, there are a million reasons why Ukraine wound up with the specific borders it was granted upon independence, but that’s really irrelevant. It’s borders were recognized and they should have been respected. Putin’s project to constitute the Soviet Empire isn’t consistent with the peace and order of the world, and this is true without taking into account his failures as a student of history.