Monthly Archives: March 2022

Oblivious

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Nero fiddled, but in the modern world, President Joe Biden (D)…bicycles. And he’s not even doing it in the capital like Nero did; he’s ducking out to Delaware to take his rides. Meanwhile, Kyiv burns, Kharkhiv burns, Kherson burns, Mariupol is being razed to the ground, Lviv is getting missiles and bombs dropped on it, barbarians are bombing women, children, hospitals, schools, refugee convoys on routes the barbarians pretended to agree to leave alone. Much of Ukraine burns.

And then other nations that Russia President Vladimir Putin wants to conquer in order to reconstitute the Russian empire will burn. And the conflagration is likely to grow from there.

Bicycling is good exercise, and the physical effort is good for clearing the mind and momentarily relieving the stress of office, even for one who so dedicatedly ducks out on those stresses at every opportunity.

However, Biden doesn’t need to run off to Delaware’s coast every time he takes the notion to go for a bike ride. There’s a nice, five-mile circuit closer to home that he could use to his heart’s content, if he weren’t so insistent on getting out of town.

He could ride his bicycle from the White House up Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue, then take 23rd Street NW to loop the Lincoln Memorial, then return along Independence Avenue to Maryland Avenue, and finish back at the White House.

Easy peasy.

But easier for this president [sic] to hie off to Delaware to duck away from the stresses of office. And to avoid facing the world.

Oh, yeah—there is this on his calendar for tomorrow:

Biden is slated to travel to Brussels, Belgium, this week for the March 24 NATO summit on Russia’s war in Ukraine[.]

No plans, though, to travel to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like some eastern European heads of state did a few short days ago.

That would be a bicycle ride too much.

The Putin-Xi Relationship

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The Wall Street Journal asked in its Thursday article concerning President Joe Biden’s (D) Friday telecon with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping whether the call, or any other factor, would shift [the PRC’s] alignment with Russia.

The answer is crystalline in my NSHO.

Not a chance. Putin’s performance in Ukraine and his request for Xi to send him additional arms, military foodstuffs, and money represent a golden opportunity for Xi to reduce Putin to even further dependency on Xi and on the PRC, and to solidify the PRC’s presence in eastern and southern Siberia. That presence already is greatly expanded over prior years by the Putin-Xi economic agreement to have the PRC and Russia jointly exploit the Siberian resources, with a significant fraction of the produce going to the PRC and with PRC citizens (and their families) moving into Siberia to provide the labor.

Xi won’t pass that up, and he doesn’t care in the slightest what other nations’ politicians might think of him. The gains will be worth it to him.

A Tiny Step

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Senators Joni Ernst (R, IA), Chuck Grassley (R, IA), and Ron Johnson (R, WI) are proposing a law to modify how student loans are made. Their bill, the Student Transparency for Understanding Decisions in Education Net Terms, or STUDENT (aren’t we cute), Act

would provide student loan applicants with an estimate of the total amount of interest they would pay, based on a standard 10-year repayment plan, during or prior to taking out a loan….

It’s easy enough to calculate the amortization table, and the periodic and total interest paid, for any loan; there should be no problem in requiring the lender to include the tables in their student loan offers. But why wait until after the students have taken out the loan?

Aside from fixing that little fillip, though, more useful moves regarding the student loan industry include these:

  • get the government out of the student loan business altogether, including both extending the loan or guaranteeing one
  • privatize the student loan industry. Require the college/university that has the student who is taking out the loan in order to attend that college/university
    • co-sign the student loan, or
    • extend at least half of the total loan in partnership with the private lender

Of course, at the Federal level, enforcement of the second bullet would be limited to withholding Federal funds from those colleges or universities declining to satisfy either of the requirements. Further Federal enforcement would be limited to withholding a fraction of Federal transfers to those States who choose not to enact similar requirements and to otherwise publicizing and jawboning those States who choose not to go along. Those are strong incentives, though.

Support for Russia

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As the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping considers shipping money, arms, “nonperishable foods,” any other material to support Russia President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of and atrocities on Ukraine and that nation’s women and children, and hospitals and schools, and innocents sheltering in bomb shelters against the barbarians’ rockets, missiles, and bombs, the video below is what Xi will be actively approving, not merely tacitly condoning.

As Union of South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa actually blames NATO for Putin’s naked aggression, and refuses to blame Russia for its barbaric behavior, the video below illustrates the nature of Putin’s invader barbarians that Ramaphosa actively approves.

Heads up. The video is behind Aplhabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s YouTube warning that the video is too harsh for Americans to see without being warned first. Which is, itself, an indication of the barbarism of which Xi and Ramaphosa approve.

Here is the video.

Governments that support such behavior are themselves ill-matched for the civilized world, and interaction with them should be done rarely and with great caution.

A Thought on Gasoline Production

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I had one. Take a breath.

California citizens pay a far higher price for a gallon of gasoline than even the average nation-wide: $5.79 against $4.29. Most of that difference comes from California’s State-unique regulations imposing, for instance, a low-carbon fuel standard and cap-and-trade taxes.

Separate from President Joe Biden’s (D) war on fossil fuel-sourced energy inflating the price of energy generally and gasoline in particular, that California price-inflating set of requirements also inflates the cost of gasoline nationally, since refiners are reluctant to produce separate kinds of gasoline for separate markets. Which brings me to my thought.

Refiners should produce a single type of gasoline related to carbon content, cap-and-trade taxes, and other froo-froo, based on the lower levels of regulatory interference in the rest of the nation, and sell that gasoline virtually nation-wide. Then they should offer to sell that single type to California buyers together with license(s) so those buyers can to modify the refiners’ product as they wish to bring that gasoline to within California desires.

In this way, drivers in the other 49 States would get a lower cost fuel from the refiners’ not having to impose some of that California cost on the rest of us, and the refiners would be able to recoup in the form of license fees most, if not all, of the putative costs of not selling directly into the California driver market.