This spring, Ukrainian farmers might have a little trouble between missile strikes getting their crops planted. However, if Ukrainian agriculture is taken offline by war, American farmers can make up some of the difference by raising food rather than fuel additives. That is, if Congress lets them.
In July of 2021, this writer took a little trip through rural Missouri. Besides visiting kinfolk whom I hadn’t seen for far too long, one purpose of my trip was simply to do something else, something different. You see, I’d become something of a recluse and I really needed to just go outside, blow the stink off, maybe even commune with Nature, whatever that is.
My destination was a spot near the center of the northeast quadrant of the state, about a three-hour trip by car. The most expeditious route from Kansas City would be to take I-70 to Columbia and then motor north on US 63 for about an hour. Not really interested in expedience, I chose the scenic route, “a road less traveled,” US 24 to be exact.
Driving eastward on 24, what impressed me was the modern world’s utter dependence on petroleum. Not only was I leisurely tooling along in my 1990 Taurus, which happens to burn gasoline, but everything I surveyed depended on oil. The lawns and pastures of the rural folk were nicely manicured. All that mowing takes a lot of oil, but that’s nothing when compared to the crops, especially the corn.
The corn crop did not look like any corn that this kid could remember. It was lush and tightly packed, dense even. Every field looked like it had been planted and cultivated by the same farmer, maybe some corporation. I’d bet a buck that this corn I drove past was genetically-modified Frankencorn, and totally dependent on high-powered fertilizers. I’ve probably eaten tons of it in the cheap salty corn chips I’m addicted to.
Corn (a.k.a. maize) is used not just as food for people and cattle, it’s also used to produce ethanol, and not just for boozers, but to mix in with our gasoline.
Since 2005, Congress has required oil refineries to add ethanol, mostly from corn, to their gasoline. It’s called the “Renewable Fuel Standard” (RFS). The EPA runs the program. In January, Reuters reported: “EPA will have to decide on the next phase of the program in coordination with the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. The EPA plans to propose requirements… in May this year.”
Members of Congress should not leave the changing of RFS to some pointy-headed bureaucrat in the administrative state (i.e. the EPA) but should adjust the program themselves. And they should seriously consider ending the program. Or, they might consider an idea floated in “How To Fix The Ethanol Industry” by Robert Rapier at Forbes in 2019.
To understand just how wacky the RFS is, read “Stop the Ethanol Madness” by Mario Loyola, which ran at the Atlantic in November of 2019. Loyola explains how RFS is not only uneconomic but is also destroying the environment. Loyola asserts that “today’s corn-ethanol program is a glaring failure, and it is unconscionable that politicians of both parties are conspiring to keep it alive despite knowing full well what its problems are.”
One of the transcendent features of left-wing people, regardless of time and place, is their complete lack of self-awareness. The great blind spot for all left-wing people is the reflection in the mirror. They are incapable of seeing themselves other than as the hero in a great struggle. This story out of Canada about the correlation between Covid-loving and Putin-hating is a great example. The Left thinks it confirms their righteous hatred of their enemy, but it merely confirms their lack of self-awareness.
According to the story, “Unvaccinated Canadians are about 12 times more likely than those who received three doses to believe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, according to a new survey by national polling firm EKOS.” Now, polling is a dodgy business, so this could be a fake poll designed to titillate the far-left. The fact that such a scenario is possible, however, is more proof of the general thesis about the far-left’s lack of self-awareness.
There are two ideas advanced in the coverage of this poll. One is that the unvaccinated are immoral, so it stands to reason that they support the evil Hitler guy. The Left all over the West has been fixated on the vaccine as a moral signifier. They rushed to be the first to prove their piety within the Covid cult and they rushed to condemn the vaccine skeptics as ignorant hooligans. The Left would have embraced face tattoos for the vaccinated if it was an option.
With inflation at a forty-year high, it is the topic on everyone’s mind. US core inflation has reached 7.5 percent year over year, and the prices of certain goods, such as used cars and steak, are up as much as 50 percent over the past year. This is a major threat to the current administration, with a recent poll showing that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Joe Biden’s handling of inflation. Inflation is incredibly unpopular with voters, and there is a strong political incentive to ease the public’s perception of rising prices, either through policies or through modifying the inflation statistics themselves.
One method government has historically used for easing the perception of inflation is to push for the consumption of low-cost goods through government recommendations and subsidies. This strategy has been used especially frequently in the agriculture industry, since food comprises a major variable expense in people’s everyday budgets. In the 1970s, during a period of high inflation, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz pushed for policies that would encourage the mass production of low-cost monocrops such as corn and soy. He famously told farmers to “get big or get out” and urged farmers to plant commodity crops “from fencerow to fencerow.”
Getting consumers to substitute lower-cost goods in their consumption can have a masking effect on Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation, since a change to the consumption of lower-cost goods offsets the general rise in price level. As Saifedean Ammous writes in The Fiat Standard: “By subsidizing the production of the cheapest foods and recommending them to Americans as the optimal components of their diet, the extent of price increases and currency debasement is less obvious” (114).
This scenario is exactly what has played out in the US since the 1970s, with the US government’s health guidelines showing a “continuous decline in the recommendation of meat and an increase in the recommendations of grains, legumes, industrial oils, and various other nutritionally poor foods that benefit from industrial economies of scale,” as Ammous notes (114). In fact, the original version of the food pyramid was developed amid high food prices in Sweden in 1972, with an express goal of promoting cheap and basic foods that would provide adequate nutrition. This shift in dietary recommendations during the seventies coincided with the rapid rise in US obesity rates, a trend which continues to this day.
In addition to government dietary recommendations, farm subsidies have also played a significant role in the manipulation of agricultural production and consumer diets. The majority of farm subsidies are given to large-scale farms, especially to those producing corn, wheat, and soybeans. Between 1995 and 2020, total US farm subsidies for these three crops alone exceeded $200 billion. Farms producing these monocrops are subsidized, leading to these crops’ relative overproduction. The prices of these already cheap foods are thus artificially lowered at the expense of everything else, which in turn causes an increase in their consumption, lowering recorded inflation.
This phenomenon helps to explain at least in part the motivation for federal organizations to push for a low-meat or entirely meat-free diet. Meat has always been a more expensive food source per calorie, and for the past several decades it has been increasing in price at a faster rate than most other foods; this is likely because meat, especially when pasture raised, is harder to mass produce, so its production benefits less from industrialization.
The above illustration shows the percent change in prices of certain foods from January 2000 to today. Although the average inflation of core food prices over this period was 2.56 percent annually, the category of meat, poultry, and fish increased at the higher rate of 3.20 percent, and specific foods such as sirloins, ribeye, and other cuts of beef increased at an even higher rate of 4 percent or more per year over this period. As one would expect, the categories of baked goods, fruits, and vegetables increased in price at a slower pace, due in part to the fact that their inputs include crops such as wheat, soy, and corn—the very crops that the US tends to subsidize and recommend.
John-Henry Westen from LifeSiteNews.com interviews Jack Maxey, who was one of the first journalists to be given access to a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drives, which contain shocking evidence of moral and financial corruption within the Biden family, in what Maxey calls “The biggest National security scandal in the history of our planet.”
Maxey says “There are a dozen hours of Hunter smoking crack and there is child pornography [including of Hunter with his own 13-year old niece]. The FBI had this laptop before the first [Trump] impeachment. There is a concentrated effort to protect the Biden family.”
The Hunter Biden files detail Hunter’s direct involvement with Chairman Xi Jinping, the Biden family’s Beijing-backed business deals all over the world and possible Chinese infiltration of the US Government with Hunter Biden’s help.
Emails show Hunter Biden and the Chinese eventually scrambling to clean up their mess, as the Bidens’ top business contacts end up arrested or “disappeared”. Hunter goes so far as to purposefully incriminate his own family members, including his president father to protect himself.
Perhaps the most stunning of all, the American intelligence community knew for years about what Rudy Giuliani has called the ‘Biden Crime Family’ and they did nothing about it for darker reasons than you might think.
With the ruble mostly stuck in sanctions limbo and trading around 100 to the dollar in recent days (an improvement from the USDRUB 140 hit on March 8), the Kremlin appears to have found a new way to prop up the Russian currency besides merely central bank interventions: make foreign customers of Russian gas demand it.
During an address to the nation moments ago, Vladimir Putin said that Russia will demand that countries it has labeled “unfriendly” (which includes U.S., U.K., and European Union countries) must pay in rubles for Russian gas, Interfax reported. As a result, Putin ordered the central bank and government in a week’s time to determine the scheme of ruble payments for Russian gas, and also ordered Gazprom to make corresponding changes to gas contracts.
Putin also said that Russia will continue supplying contracted volumes, will only change payment currency.
The Russian leader said it makes no sense to export goods to the U.S. or EU in dollars or euros, according to the news service.
Following Putin’s comments, the Russian ruble strengthened rising 3% at MICEX after indicative prices briefly jumped more than 8% twice; on Bloomberg terminals, the RUB was up 4.9%, though most of its prices are indicative and not tradable. 1M Rub forwards, which do trade on Bloomberg, gained over 4 rubles to ~103.
First it was a US demand that China vote to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then suspiciously-sourced accusations that China was to provide military equipment to China, to now a sudden new round of sanctions on China. Does Washington really believe China will act as the US proxy in the region? Does Washington want to take on both Russia AND China (and maybe India)? Also today, US firms not told to leave Russia, White House claims. And, Ukraine’s Zelensky bans opposition parties and all non pro-Zelensky media…
Four years of preventable and utterly pointless bloodshed ensued. Thanks to calls to oppose aggression and defend allies, what should have been a regional war in the Balkans became a major Europe-wide war. Even worse, with the Treaty of Versailles and the inclusion of the absurd “War Guilt” clause against Germany, the war set the stage for the far more destructive Second World War.
With proponents of military intervention and war, it’s always 1938, and every attempt to substitute diplomacy for escalation and war is “appeasement.”
Last week, for example, Ukrainian legislator Lesia Vasylenko accused Western leaders of appeasement over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, stating “This is the same as 1938 when also the world and the United States in particular were averting their eyes from what was being done by Hitler and his Nazi Party.” The week before that, Estonian legislator Marko Mihkelson declared “I hope I’m wrong but I smell ‘Munich’ here. ”
These, of course, are references to the notorious Munich conference of 1938 when UK PM Neville Chamberlain (and others) agreed to allow Hitler’s Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as a means to avoid a general war in Europe. The “appeasement,” of course, failed to prevent war because Hitler’s regime actually planned to annex much more than that.
Ever since, the “Lesson of Munich” for advocates of military intervention is that it’s always best to escalate international conflicts and meet all perceived aggressors with immediate military force rather than embrace compromise or non-intervention.
Americans have made similar references with pundits from Larry Elder to Peter Singer peppering their musings on the Ukraine War with the Munich analogy. One need only enter “Munich” and “1938” into a Twitter search to receive an apparently endless number of tweets from newly minted American foreign policy experts about how anything less than World War III is Munich all over again. Historically, countless American politicians have used the analogy as well. 1980s Cold Warriors denounced Ronald Reagan’s efforts to limit nuclear weapons as Munich-style appeasement. Republicans routinely claimed Obama’s Iran diplomacy was the same.
But it is not, in fact, the case that every act of diplomacy or compromise designed to avoid war is appeasement. Moreover, we can find countless examples in which non-intervention and a refusal to escalate a situation was—or would have been—the better choice.
In other words, it’s not always 1938. Rather than fixating on the “Lesson of 1938” the better lesson to learn is often the “Lesson or 1914” or perhaps even the lessons of 1853, 1956, or 1968. In all these cases, military escalation was—or would have been—the wrong response. Moreover, in the age of nuclear weapons—something that did not exist in 1938—the world is a different place and confrontation with a nuclear power could potentially bring about the end of human civilization. Casually bandying about demands for a “no fly zone”—which would mean war with Russia—is both irresponsible and the sort of rhetoric fit for a non-nuclear world that ceased to exist many decades ago.
The Foundations of the “Lessons of Munich”
The supposed Lesson of Munich is based on two basic pillars. The first is the assumption that any act of military aggression will lead to many more acts of military aggression if not forcefully countered. It is basically a variation on the domino theory: if one nation submits to conquest by an aggressive neighbor, other nations will soon be forced to submit as well. This assumes every allegedly aggressive state has the same motivations as Nazi Germany and can plausibly seek a large, region-wide chain of military conquests across numerous states.
The second pillar of the Lesson of Munich is that, since every aggressive military act is likely to lead to many more, the only realistic option is to meet aggression with escalation, and a no-compromise response.
This is precisely why Western advocates of military adventurism repeatedly equate Hitler with every foreign leader Western elites don’t like. Or, as noted at The Conversation:
This kind of parallelism is not new; it is used every time there is a new enemy the public opinion should focus on. In recent years, according to Western rhetoric, Adolf Hitler has already been apparently reincarnated several times – as Saddam Hussein, Mohammad Qaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and more besides.
In 2022, Putin is the new Hitler, which necessarily means to some that any failure to respond to the Russian invasion with a full-blown military response from the West is a Munich-style appeasement.
The fact that the events of 1938 are so well known by so many has helped considerably in pushing the narrative that compromise or non-intervention is appeasement. For most Americans, it’s likely the only event in the history of diplomacy they actually know anything about. Never mind the fact that the Lesson of Munich has often been proven quite inapplicable to the modern world. As noted by Robert Kelly at the hardly non-interventionist publication 1945:
This frightening image of falling dominoes is not actually historically common though, thankfully. It was in the 1930s, but it was not, for example, in the Cold War. Aggressors do not always read one victory in place to mean they can automatically push on other ‘dominoes.’ Deterrence is structured by local and historical factors; some commitments are much more credible than others. So even though the US lost in Vietnam, North Korea or East Germany did not attack South Korea or West Germany, just as the US did not attack Cuba or Nicaragua after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.
In Ukraine that means that Western reticence to fight directly against the Russians in Ukraine does not automatically mean that Putin will test NATO’s collective security commitment or that China will attack Taiwan.
But none of this matters when the public believes what its told by politicians and the media about how every rogue state is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. There is no foreign-policy lesson to learn except that of opposing each new “Hitler.”
The Lesson of 1914
Yet, there are other competing lessons to be learned. Lessons can be found, say, with the lead up to the Crimean War in 1853 or the July Crisis of 1914. (Ask the average American about either of these and you will probably receive a blank stare.)
In both of these cases, regimes claimed they were countering aggression by foreign states and protecting either “allies” or oppressed minorities in the lands being subjected to conquest.
The lead up the First World War provides an especially cautionary tale in which the major powers rushed to intervene in the name of supporting allies. The Austrian regime issued an ultimatum to the Serbians, and the Russians—with the support of France, Europe’s biggest democracy—mobilized in support of traditional ally Serbia. The Germans then mobilized in support of Austria-Hungary. Later, the regimes in the United Kingdom and the United States employed propaganda about alleged German war crimes in Belgium to ensure their respective countries entered the war. British politicians also claimed they must intervene to assist Britain’s Entente allies in resisting aggression. Four years of preventable and utterly pointless bloodshed ensued. Thanks to calls to oppose aggression and defend allies, what should have been a regional war in the Balkans became a major Europe-wide war. Even worse, with the Treaty of Versailles and the inclusion of the absurd “War Guilt” clause against Germany, the war set the stage for the far more destructive Second World War.
Yet, the war was a result of regimes doing—from their own perspectives—what the “Lesson of Munich” dictates: rush to war and immediately escalate and confront “enemies” with military force in the name of countering aggression.
The Lesson of 1914 is certainly instructive today. Escalation is extraordinarily unwise, especially if there is the potential of turning limited wars into mega-scale disasters. Moreover, in the case of the United States, the complexity of the war’s causes meant there was no justifiable reason at all for the United States to enter. There was no “good guy” in the war and American participation only further extended the bloodshed.
Fortunately, in spite of its pretensions of being the global guarantor of freedom always and everywhere, the United States has, at least twice, behaved as if it has learned the Lesson of 1914. The first was in 1956 when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary when the Hungarian regime—an ostensibly sovereign state—became too uppity to suit Moscow. So, Soviet military might moved in to ensure Hungary remained sufficiently under Moscow’s control. Thousands of Hungarians were killed. Did NATO mobilize against this aggression? Did Eisenhower ready America’s bombers? No.
Then, in Prague in 1968, Czechoslovakian resistance to Moscow led to an invasion of 200,000 foreign troops and 2,500 tanks from the pro-Soviet regimes of the Warsaw Pact. Again, the United States took no action.
This, of course, was the right decision on the part of the U.S. and NATO. Heeding the Lesson of Munich, on the other hand, would have meant direct confrontation between NATO and the Soviet Union—a de facto confrontation between the United States and the USSR. This would have greatly increased the likelihood of global nuclear war.
Naturally, some anti-Soviet activists cried “appeasement!” at the time. Fortunately, they were ignored. A curious difference between 1956 and now, however, is that at the time most of the critics of American inaction were on the anti-Soviet Right. Today, it is the Left where we mostly find those howling about Munich and blithely pushing for a U.S.-Russia war while downplaying the risk of a nuclear apocalypse. But those who are now demanding for World War III are a cautionary example of what happens when we obsess over the Lesson of 1938 and ignore the Lesson of 1914.
Mendacity is worse than dishonesty. According to one essay on mendacity, “Mendacity connotes a mixture of dishonesty, hypocrisy and audacity.” Mendacity is an important theme of the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams. “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity? There ain’t nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity!” I recently encountered this powerful and obnoxious odor in my email inbox with the arrival of a Medical News and Perspectives from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The title of this bit of medical mendacity is: “When Physicians Spread Unscientific Information about COVID-19.” Scientific information is curiously absent from the commentary. Instead, the words misinformation and disinformation in the body of the work are equated with unscientific information in the title. A number of people are accused of spreading misinformation, but no specific examples of scientifically incorrect statements are provided. The first specific claim of wrongdoing is “Ladapo continued to publicly contradict CDC recommendations on vaccines, masks, and testing.” The reader is required to accept that CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommendations are necessarily statements of scientific truth. This is religious dogma rather than the practice of the scientific method. The scientific method requires the free and open dissent from any scientific hypothesis by either empiric evidence contrary to the hypothesis or the logical extension of the hypothesis to an absurd conclusion. It is only by successful defense against dissenting opinions that scientific hypotheses become accepted as truth. By claiming that any dissent from CDC opinion is misinformation or scientific falsehood, JAMA has elevated the CDC to a divine source of infallible truth. JAMA further requests that medical boards become a new Inquisition to root out heresy and apostasy.
The JAMA commentary reserved special criticism of the organization America’s Frontline Doctors for the sins of opposition to “vaccination and mask mandates” and the promotion of “ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for prevention and early treatment of COVID-19.” The JAMA commentary is dishonest by conflating opposition to mandates with opposition to the action being mandated. It is quite possible to agree with the decision to vaccinate yet be opposed to forcing others to agree with that decision. Furthermore, claims about vaccine efficacy and safety are always debatable, given that data have been withheld from the public and are necessarily incomplete about future events. The JAMA commentary is further dishonest in its implication that promotion of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is beyond the pale. The National Library of Medicine includes citations supporting the efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for covid-19. While the quality of the scientific information is always debatable, it is mendacious to claim that promotion of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is unscientific. The JAMA commentary is hypocritical in failing to note that CDC—the oracle of Delphi—has changed its position on the efficacy of masks multiple times during the course of the covid-19 pandemic. The JAMA commentary is dripping with audacity in asserting that anyone contradicting the CDC deserves excommunication from the practice of medicine.
Another specific citation of sin in the JAMA commentary noted: “A widely publicized January 23, 2022, march against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Washington, DC, included physicians among its sponsors and speakers. A livestream of the event showed attendees shoulder to shoulder in front of the Lincoln Memorial, vanishingly few wearing masks.” Perhaps JAMA inquisitors should keep up with “The Science,” which currently questions the wisdom of masks during outdoor events. The history of science is full of examples where heresy and apostasy become generally accepted scientific truths.
The JAMA commentary is a typical authoritarian response to dissent. Authoritarians insist that people practice the logical fallacy known as appeal to authority. In this case, JAMA asserts that any statement from the CDC must be true, so any contradiction of CDC policy must be unscientific or misinformation. In this way, authoritarians relieve themselves of the difficult task of persuading people about the truth of their claims. The most common reason why people reject statements from authority is recent memory of lies from the same authority. The CDC has damaged its own credibility by admissions that it has withheld significant data on vaccines because the data might be misinterpreted. Rather than correct the mendacity of authority to increase trust in authority, the authoritarians demand that disagreement with authority be punished by some form of excommunication from civil discourse. In this case, rather than recognizing that the prevalence of people who disagree with statements made by the CDC is based on previous false or misleading statements by the CDC, JAMA asserts that any dissent from the CDC statements must be purged or silenced. True science with a small s welcomes dissent and agrees to debate dissent on the merits of the arguments rather than ad hominem attacks on the dissenters. The medical establishment is afraid to debate dissenters on the merits of the arguments demonstrating the weakness of the establishment narrative. JAMA does not even pretend to demonstrate that the heretics and apostates have made false statements. Instead, JAMA asserts that the CDC is infallible and any contradiction of CDC policy by physicians is de facto proof of heresy and should be punished by excommunication. The stench of mendacity emanating from the medical establishment has become powerful and obnoxious.
Gilbert Berdine is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and an affiliate of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
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