So when it is all said and done, anyone expecting electricity prices to come down due to the wonders of “free wind” is in for a nasty surprise. This ultimately is going to lead to higher electricity prices and that is higher inflation, higher interest rates, and everything thereafter.
It seems that each week that goes by we come up with variations of the same themes, one of which is supply destruction and restriction of fossil fuels. For want of doubt check out the latest garbage from Deutsche Bank. It seems that the energy crisis of last year taught them nothing. Without coal, where would Germany be?
Deutsche Bank’s actions are nothing short of malthusian (depopulation):
Deutsche Bank AG is expanding restrictions on its financing of coal, one of the main sources of energy in its home market of Germany, as part of a wider crackdown on high-emitting sectors.
Companies that have “no credible plans” to reduce thermal coal’s contribution to their revenue below half by 2025 will see their financing cut off, the Frankfurt-based bank said in its initial transition plan, published on Thursday. For companies operating outside the OECD, the revenue threshold is 30% by 2030.
For coal, Deutsche’s target covers both thermal and metallurgical coal and builds on an existing thermal coal policy. The bank is aiming for a 49% cut in absolute terms in the broadest measure of financed emissions — known as Scope 3 — by 2030. By 2050, its goal is a 97% reduction. In cement the bank is targeting a 29% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 physical emissions intensity by 2030, and a 98% reduction by 2050.
We say contradiction because without met coal you don’t have any steel, and without coal you don’t have any cement (thermal coal is mainly used in the cement manufacturing process). And without thermal coal you don’t have any electricity… and without electricity you don’t have any aluminium (amongst other base metals) or polysilicon.
Cutting a long story short: without coal you cannot produce renewable energy producing equipment.
But wait, this story becomes even more logic defying. From a bloomberg article:
Here is an excerpt from the EU Commission press release:
Achieving the recently agreed EU target of at least 42.5% renewable energy by 2030, with an ambition to reach 45% renewables, will require a massive increase in wind installed capacity with an expected growth from 204 GW in 2022 to more than 500 GW in 2030.
Can this be achieved?
Well, miracles have been known to happen from time to time:
Eugene Bertram Krupa (January 15, 1909 – October 16, 1973),[1] was an American jazzdrummer, bandleader and composer.[2][3] Krupa is widely regarded as one of the most influential drummers in the history of popular music. His drum solo on Benny Goodman‘s 1937 recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing” elevated the role of the drummer from an accompanist to an important solo voice in the band.
In collaboration with the Slingerland drum and Zildjian cymbal manufacturers, he was a major force in defining the standard band drummer’s kit. Krupa is considered “the founding father of the modern drumset” by Modern Drummer magazine.[4]
Upon his death, The New York Times labeled Krupa a “revolutionary” known for “frenzied, flashy” drumming, with his work having generated a significant musical legacy that started “in jazz and has continued on through the rock era.”[5] – Wikipedia
When Benny Goodman first hired Krupa he was put at the back of the bandstand. The standard place for the drummer. That didn’t last long.
This morning, my dog Loki — who has a puppy heart still at 14 months, and will no doubt always have a puppy temperament, whatever his age —stepped out into Thanksgiving morning; into the upstate New York, rural, outside world.
He walked onto the porch of the house where we are staying, as if he was witnessing the most extraordinary miracle. He paused and gazed in evident wonderment. Blue sky, arcing overhead! The slope of the earth down to a little valley! Slow silvery river meandering at the bottom of it; foothills in the distance, covered in trees now bare of leaves! Astonishing.
There is a cemetery to our left, with headstones going back to the early 19th century. It is still active; week by week earth-moving machines still prepare to lay to rest the fathers and mothers of this long-established small-town community, who have passed. There are Mardi Gras beads draped onto some of the headstones, a touch I find hopeful and comforting. Some gravestones are decorated with American flags; perhaps these were veterans. Some now have small pumpkins nestled against them, and some have artificial poinsettias, adorning them early, preparatory to Christmas. Love, clearly, carries on; among us, as in every culture, we long to include the beloved dead in the celebrations that mark our lives.
There is the white 19th century wooden church in the midst of the cemetery, with its spire lifting to heaven; it is now a sculptors’ studio, which is also oddly comforting; rather than God’s house having fallen into emptiness and disrepair, God’s house now shelters people creating beauty for His human family.
The bushes outside are rust-brown now, but studded throughout with enamel-like scarlet pods, like jewelry. The formerly crimson Japanese Maple has shed its leaves, and reaches bare black arms to the clear blue sky.
I can’t imagine the scene entirely through puppy eyes, but I understand Loki’s incredulity: through human eyes, too, yes, it is all a wonder.
I turned with Loki and headed into the grassy slope to the left of the house, now planted with mature trees. The hillside had been bare, we were told, when the people who built this house and planted these trees forty years ago, made their start. The couple who made the decisions to plant — especially the wife, whose vision had directed the placement of the trees, and who had nurtured the cozy but elegant garden; who had put a small sculpture of an angel in the center of a walkway between beds of now-dormant lavender — have both passed away. There is a stone bench that reads “Gone But Not Forgotten”, and a grieving stone angel near it, both devoted to their memory, under the sheltering trees.
When I walk under these trees, I think with gratitude of them both, though I have never met them. They are not here to see how much beauty they have left behind them for others to enjoy, but their legacy is extraordinary. I believe the husband was a New York City police officer, who then retired; I believe the wife was a homemaker. They were not handed privilege, but they nonetheless accomplished remarkable things. By planting trees on this bare hillside, by believing in growth, by believing in their own powers to shape their world; by having a vision and pursuing it; by building a house and planting a garden, by placing a stone angel among lavender beds, they created a magical world that lives on, that affects the living, that will inspire people who visit this place, into the future.
Loki dove into the grassy stretch under the trees, delirious with happiness. He leapt and leapt into the light and shadow as if into the spray of an an ocean. He looked back at me: that was my signal to run. When I run (and yes, I am running again with Loki, more carefully, now that I have recovered from my fall), he is all joy, all speed, all pure instinct of movement. He darted; he couldn’t believe it. Piles of fallen orange leaves to smell! Animal scents! Squirrels! He dashed this way and that, and I did my best to keep up the race behind him.
At one point he paused and looked back at me again. Behind him, about thirty feet away, I saw a stag emerge from just past an ancient low stone wall. The stag rose up like an apparition. He had a flare of white on his chest, powerful buff-colored shoulders, and a noble neck; he lifted his elegant head to gaze directly at me. His antlers, not yet large – he must have been young – were like a crown. I was not afraid, and he seemed not to be afraid. We beheld one another in perfect calm.
Now well-ensconced in my eighth decade, I can recall many memorable Thanksgiving dinners, more than a few cooked up lovingly by yours truly. The best and most memorable, however, were rooted in the 1960s.
My father had moved the family out to Mill Valley, California, just north of the Golden Gate, in the gentle shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, so he could pursue his career as a baseball writer in the luminous shadow of the great Willie Mays. He covered the Giants for the Examiner, first at Seals Stadium in the Mission District, then — a couple of years later — at Candlestick Park in South San Francisco, perhaps history’s worst place to watch history’s greatest ballplayer.
In the offseason Dad worked as the Examiner’s Entertainment Editor, and it was in this capacity that he encountered Bob Grison, a great San Francisco restauranteur, proprietor and founder of Grison’s Steak and Chop House, all mahogany, white linen, and brass upholstery tacks, with an easy elegance that fit my father’s pedestrian ballpark sensibilities like an old brown shoe.
Everything about Grison’s — including the standard menu…
…was timeless, and it was here my family dined each Thanksgiving for several years in the early 1960s…
The long‐awaited text of Senator Bill Cassidy’s (R‑LA) legislation to impose a tax on imports based on “pollution intensity” was released on November 3. Fisher’s previous piece highlighted how Senator Cassidy’s concept of a “foreign pollution fee” is 1) a carbon tax on imports, 2) will hurt American consumers, and 3) lays the groundwork for a domestic carbon tax. Unfortunately, those facts remain upon inspection of the bill.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R‑SC) is a sponsor of the bill but Senator Roger Wicker (R‑MS), the other original co‐sponsor of the legislation, withdrew his endorsement.
We’ve read the 92 pages of the Foreign Pollution Fee Act of 2023 (hereinafter referred to as the Cassidy Carbon Tax) so our audience doesn’t have to. There are several areas of grave concern, much of which relate to provisions in the bill that were not apparent in Senator Cassidy’s Foreign Affairsarticle, which explained the concept in broad strokes.
Israel’s best move is an immediate ceasefire. But it can’t see this through the hateful haze of its tilt. The IUSG could stop the madness with a phone call, but it prefers to keep the casino of death running full tilt.
A slightly scratched die-cast lead spinning top in an upright position on a dark background with an eerie backlight.
The Imperial U.S. Government (IUSG) and its “greatest ally,” the state of Israel, are in full psychotic & psychopathic Tilt. Together, these governments are confronting the entire planet as they reinforce each other’s fundamental and inverse mythologies.
Tilt is a phenomenon in which agents lose control of their emotions and begin making bad decision after bad decision. It is commonly associated with poker, which is fitting since our imperial elites are gambling with our civilization and the very existence of the human species.
The U.S. government began tilting hard during the Aerican Civil War and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it went into perpetual tilt following World War II when it embraced global empire.
Bad decisions were made, including the Korean War, the 1953 Iranian coup, the Vietnam War, mass surveillance of Americans, and reckless and irresponsible nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviet Union.
Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, the IUSG went into entitlement tilt. It was time to do whatever it wanted because no one could stop it! All grounding in Realpolitick was thrown aside in favor of liberal interventionist and neoconservative psychoses.
More bad decisions were made, such as Desert Storm, dual containment, Waco, backing Islamist terrorists in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, escalated Iran demonization, and NATO expansion.
When blowback came with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the IUSG descended into revenge tilt.
The IUSG, embarrassed by the massive security failure of 9/11 and emboldened by the resulting popular support, pursued its own geopolitical fantasies. It made more bad decisions.
When the great majority of the people do this, the country thrives economically. The greater the economic freedom (i.e., the less governmental oversight and regulation), the more the country thrives.
But this never lasts forever. The eternal fly in the ointment is that governments seek continually to increase their control over others.
Like waves on the ocean, countries tend to go through economic cycles.
First, we have the micro cycles, which tend to rise and fall every few years, but may last a decade or more. Then we have the macro cycles, which tend to take hundreds of years.
In a macro cycle, a nation begins to thrive economically, when the people of that country adhere to a strong work ethic. They invest their money and toil into the economy, make a profit, then either save, purchase goods, reinvest, or a combination of the three.
When the great majority of the people do this, the country thrives economically. The greater the economic freedom (i.e., the less governmental oversight and regulation), the more the country thrives.
But this never lasts forever. The eternal fly in the ointment is that governments seek continually to increase their control over others.
First, they focus on the increased control of their own people through regulations, but invariably, they see the opportunity for broader control, through the domination of other nations. They then invade those nations.
Warfare is the costliest venture that nations enter into, and as such, it’s almost always a mistake. But the zeal to have greater power often brushes that fact aside, and leaders choose to invade other nations.
In almost every instance, they fail to underestimate the resistance from the invaded nation, and very quickly, the cost of the warfare doubles and redoubles, over and over again.
Invariably, the leaders then borrow money to keep the war going. Sometimes, they achieve victory in this manner, but more often than not, they fail. They find that the day comes when they must either sell off major assets to pay their debt, or face economic collapse.
The cameras basically relocated policemen from the streets (where they are most useful) to bureaucratic offices (where they are not). I suspect that technological developments drive bureaucratisation in many other instances as well,
In The Managerial Menace, I considered the strange things that happen in academia, non-profit organisations and businesses when the resources available to them increase. As universities get wealthier, you might expect them to improve education, but instead they merely expand their administrative staff and embark on deranged decades-long construction crusades. As non-profits draw more donations, they tend not to divert more resources to their core functions, but rather to hire more staff and to increase various administrative projects like grant-making. And as businesses improve productivity, they do not merely book the increased profits, but also divert a sizeable portion of the new funds into the expansion of their white-collar ranks.
Very similar processes are at work in government, which I did not consider only because it is such an obvious example. On average, countries devote fully 10% of their gross domestic product and about 20% of public expenditures to public-sector employees. These are such incredible sums of money, especially for wealthy developed nations, that they are hard to comprehend. In the European Union, 17% of the whole workforce is employed in the public sector. The same is true in the United States. The egalitarian Scandinavian countries are the bureaucratic leaders of the West; there, state employees account for 30% of everyone with a job. Even that is nothing compared to the Eastern Bloc before 1990, where the state controlled vast parts of industry and accounted for 70% to 90% of all employment. The same applied to China before its economic liberalisation. Plainly, egalitarian impulses and the redistributive programmes which proceed from them are not purely about social welfare. When the state takes in more resources, those resources serve above all to grow the size of the state itself; often, this is the form that social welfare programmes assume, and socialist ideologies which aim to fold most private enterprise into the state are very direct and unapologetic about their programme on this front.
It was not always thus. The great expansions to government bureaucracy happened in the wake of World War I. Through the nineteenth century, states only consumed about 10% of their GDP in total – the same portion they spend on payroll alone today. During the war they increased spending massively to fund their hostilities, growing themselves in the process. The same thing happened again in World War II. Obviously, the state did not shrink after 1918 or 1945, and so we can include expanded state managerialism among the transformations wrought by the great twentieth-century wars, one which is just as significant as the political realignment these conflicts achieved.
What all of these government bureaucrats do is an interesting question. Some of them surely have necessary jobs, but a great many collect enormous salaries and spend hours on projects that appear eccentric to outsiders. Consider the case of an old neighbour of mine, a very nice man who worked as a policeman for the city of Munich. I always assumed he drove about in a police car enforcing the law, or perhaps that he was a detective. As it turns out, these were very naive understandings influenced by overmuch television. Over lunch one day, he explained that he worked in an office full of other policemen who administered red-light cameras. Their job was to evaluate all the countless photos taken of various red-light jumpers in Munich and confirm that the offending driver had indeed jumped the red light. This was necessary mostly because drivers occasionally drive through red lights to make way for emergency vehicles, and in such cases they aren’t guilty of any traffic offence. That was what he did every day; it was his entire job.
If pressed, I would place this occupation in the “necessary” column, but it still unsettles me in various ways. Here we have a technological advance, introduced to save the mundane labour of traffic policing, which in turn requires its own kind of management. The cameras basically relocated policemen from the streets (where they are most useful) to bureaucratic offices (where they are not). I suspect that technological developments drive bureaucratisation in many other instances as well, but the question would require much further study. Now, it could well be that the red light cameras save labour on balance, but if that is the case with all such advancements put together, it is not expressed in the size of the overall police force, which has only grown in Germany relative to the population. In 2000, my envelope calculations show that there was one police officer for every 257 Germans; in 2021, we had one for every 239 Germans.
In the “unnecessary” column I would place, with some regret, the occupation of a close relative of mine. He was a government bureaucrat in the classical understanding of that term; he enjoyed absolute job security and drew a substantial salary. For much of my childhood, however, I could not figure out what he actually did. When I got older, I learned that his job amounted to squaring environmental legislation with the activities of a specific branch of bureaucracy. Basically, the bureaucrats would have various development projects, and his job was to produce long reports explaining how these developments did not result in excessive habitat destruction, pollution, or whatever. He was not involved in the decision-making about development itself; the state was going to do what it was going to do in any case. At most, they might have to wait for him to complete his report. These documents had dozens of contributors, extended to many hundreds of pages, and as far as I can tell nobody read them except in a few exceptional cases when the development plans prompted litigation by local authorities or the like. Very often, state entities would simply disregard the pointless requirement of writing these reports, but this man was a great advocate of their necessity and even travelled about training other people in the writing of them. All of this is very hard to understand, and you would never design a bureaucratic system from the ground up that required efforts such as these. The man of whom I write nevertheless worked in a whole building of people devoted to pursuits of this nature. Collectively, these operations must cost the state millions, and they have no real-world purpose beyond the artificial regulatory confines of the bureaucracy itself.
I’ve proposed that these lunacies owe something to the Principle of Managerial Self-Multiplication. Whether we are studying the state bureaucracy, academia, non-profits or businesses, we see that increased resources go only partly to further the formal missions of these entities. Otherwise, they are persistently diverted to expand those sectors of the bureaucracy which have initial control over these funds, and also to give the expanded bureaucracy something to do. As universities strive to provide better education, non-profits work to do more of whatever is that non-profits do, and governments busy themselves with ever more aspects of our daily lives, their administrative requirements obviously increase, but managerial self-multiplication generally outpaces the demands of mere upscaling. The apparatus of managers grows first, and then casts after more things to manage. We end up in a vicious spiral, whereby resources grow the ranks of the managers, who grow the number of things to manage, thereby increasing the demand for resources to pay for it all, which only grows the ranks of the managers still further. This is why governments have never in history enjoyed such extravagant tax revenues, and still find themselves struggling to pay for things.
At this point an important question arises, to which I did not do full justice in my last post: What causes this cancer, and what held these processes in check before the 20th century?
People have proposed various answers to this question. Foremost among them is James Burnham, the pioneering theorist of managerialism. Burnham was a Trotskyist who became disillusioned with communism in 1940, and wrote arguably his most important book the next year, entitled The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World? Burnham proposed that it was not the proletariat that had seized power in Russia, but rather a new class of industrial and governmental “managers,” who had assumed control of the state in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, and who were also enacting their own separate revolution, at some delay, in the liberal West.
The allegory is one in which a scorpion depends on the frog for its passage across a flooded river, by hitching a lift on the frog’s back. The frog distrusts the scorpion; but reluctantly agrees. During the crossing the scorpion fatally stings the frog swimming the river, under the scorpion. They both die.
It is a tale from antiquity intended to illustrate the nature of tragedy. A Greek tragedy is one in which the crisis at the heart of any ‘tragedy’ does not arise by sheer mischance. The Greek sense is that tragedy is where something happens because it has to happen; because of the nature of the participants; because the actors involved make it happen. And they have no choice but to make it happen, because that is their nature.
It is a story that was deployed by a former senior Israeli diplomat, well versed in U.S. politics. His telling of the frog fable has Israel’s leaders desperately fending off responsibility for the 7 October débacle, with a cabinet furiously trying to turn the crisis (psychologically) from culpable disaster – to present the Israeli public instead with an image of epic opportunity.
The chimaera being presented is one that by reaching back to earliest Zionist ideology, Israel can turn the catastrophe in Gaza – as Finance Minister Smotrich has long argued – into a solution that once and for all ‘unilaterally resolves the inherent contradiction between Jewish and Palestinian aspirations – by ending the illusionthat any kind of compromise, reconciliation or partition is possible.
This is the potential scorpion sting: the Israeli cabinet betting all on a hugely risky strategy – a new Nakba – that could draw Israel into major conflict, but in so doing also sink what remains of western prestige.
Of course, as the former Israeli diplomat underlines, this ploy is essentially constructed around Netanyahu’s personal ambition – he manoeuvres to alleviate criticism and to stay in power as long as he can. More importantly, he hopes this will enable him to spread the blame, shedding all and any responsibility and accountability from himself. [Better still], “it can place Gaza in an historic and epic context as an event that might render the PM as a formative wartime leader of grandeur and glory”.
Far-fetched? Not necessarily.
Netanyahu may be writhing politically for survival, but he is a true ‘believer’ too. In his book, Going to the Wars, historian Max Hastings writes that Netanyahu told him in the 1970s that, “In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have the chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.”
And what is the Israeli cabinet thinking about the ‘next war’? It thinks ‘Hizbullah. As one minister noted recently, ‘after Hamas, we will turn to deal with Hizbullah’.
It is precisely the confluence of a lengthy war in Gaza (along lines established in 2006), and an Israeli leadership seemingly intent to provoke Hizbullah on to, and up, the escalatory ladder, which is causing red lights to flash inside the White House, according to the former Israeli diplomat.
In the 2006 war with Hizbullah, the entire urban populated suburb of Beirut – Dahiya – was levelled. General Eizenkot (who commanded Israeli forces during that war and is now a member in Netanyahu’s ‘War Cabinet’) said in 2008: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on … From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases … This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
Hence the Gaza treatment.
It is not likely that the Israeli War Cabinet seeks to provoke a full-scale invasion of Israel by Hizbullah (which would represent an existential threat); but Netanyahu and the cabinet might like to see the present exchange of fire on the northern border escalate to the point at which the U.S. feels compelled itself to rain some warning blows onto Hizballah’s military infrastructure.
With the IDF already striking 40 kms deep into Lebanon at civilians (a car with a grandmother and her three nieces was incinerated last week by an IDF missile), the U.S. concern at escalation is real.
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children. Thomas-Greenfield’s policy statements suggest Israelis are deserving of human rights, while Palestinians are not.
In 2015, Thomas-Greenfield received the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award, and yet her current presence at the UN has not exhibited any humanitarian urgency for Gaza, which her own colleagues at the UN are calling a humanitarian disaster, and genocide.
She forgets that her own ancestry mirrors the Palestinians, not the Israelis. She is representing the interests of the masters, while denying the oppressed people’s rights.
Thomas-Greenfield is the great granddaughter of Mary Francoise, who was born in 1865 in Louisiana. Mary was born after the civil war ended, but she was not born into freedom; her mother had been a slave, and even though the war ended, it would be decades before any African Americans were given their rights.
Mary Francoise might as well have been born in the Occupied West Bank, or Gaza. Her life and the lives of Palestinians today have a great deal in common. She lived in a land where the colonial government in Washington, DC. had two separate codes of justice and human rights. The White European settlers came to Virginia in 1607 and shortly were bringing thousands of enslaved Africans. The Native Americans were deprived of all human rights, and many were kept as slaves.
Mary’s son, Oliver Thomas, and his son, Oliver Thomas, Jr. were born ‘free’ in America, but had no right to vote, to live where they chose, to sit anywhere on the bus, except in the back, to eat in a restaurant with White people, to use a public bathroom used by White people, and no right to a decent education alongside White classmates. Thomas-Greenfield’s parents were illiterate, and she was the first in her family to graduate from high school.
Palestinians are not allowed to own land in Israel, and much of the land they live on in the West Bank has been bulldozed to make way of illegal Jewish settlements for decades. Building permits in East Jerusalem are denied to Palestinians. The people who live in Gaza today are the original inhabitants of other areas, and were forced to be segregated into a ghetto called Gaza.
Thomas-Greenfield attended an all-Black high school in Baker, East Baton Rouge County, Louisiana. In 1960, the total population of Baker was 4,823 persons, and by 2020 the population is 82% African American, the descendants of slaves, with 12% living at or below the poverty line.
She grew up in segregated Louisiana, where by law and tradition White students and Black students never sat together. When desegregation finally came to Louisiana in 1960, only four Black girls attempted to go to a White school and violence ensued by White parents.
In 2021, Tammy C. Barnett wrote that Louisiana’s history of racism is historical, and present. Barnett cites the definition: “Racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.” By this definition, we can see that the Israeli policy toward all Palestinians is racist.
MCViewPoint 