Monthly Archives: November 2022

Two Things

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Former President Donald Trump’s candidates won their primaries—and they lost in the general election. The Republican Party needs to move on from Trump: he was an effective President, and for the most part, his policies were sound. However, his post-2020 election behavior and rhetoric have been nakedly divisive, and his attacks have been directed more at Republicans than at Progressive-Democrats. Trump has made himself counterproductive to Republican and to national interests, and the Republican Party needs to render him irrelevant.

The other thing is that the Progressive-Democratic Party heavily influenced the Republican Party’s primary nominees, getting Progressive-Democrat-favored Republicans nominated on seven occasions. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s general election candidates then defeated all seven.

Republicans need to do two things about this, one of which has a broader, necessarily critical, application. The one is that Republicans need to call out the Progressive-Democratic Party’s interference, identify the campaign ads, and then emphasize their intrinsically (if strictly legal) dishonest nature and the desperate ploys that they are.

The other, broader thing is Republican messaging. Every Republican candidate individually, needs to talk heavily about what his policies—concrete, measurable policies—will be if he’s elected. It’s not enough to speak only about the other guy’s failures, though that does need to be a part of the messaging. It’s watery gruel, indeed, too, to speak only in glittering generalities about the Republican candidate’s own policies and goals. More than that: all of the individual candidate policies need to come from a wholly unified party set of policies so that each of the candidates is fighting for the same thing at a national scale, as well as a local one, rather than irrelevantly of each other or outright at cross purposes with each other.

Bonus thing: as long as early voting is going to be a thing in our general elections, Republicans need to work to get their voters out early, also, if only to mitigate the traditional advantage Progressive-Democrats have in early voting numbers and late counting of in-person voting. This would mitigate the opportunities for shenanigans regarding those early voting and late counting numbers.

This brings up an additional bonus thing: our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, says this:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

That ability of Congress to change or alter States’ election prescriptions is key here. States have, in my not so humble opinion, early voting periods that are far too long and mail-in balloting rules that are too loose. The former encourages voting to occur before candidates have developed their campaigns very much, even before the candidates have debated each other at all. It also gets too many voters committed before any late- or moderately late-breaking events that otherwise would affect a candidate’s viability. The latter is too vulnerable to ballot harvesting, misplaced/misbehaved-on ballots, ballots pushed to voters whether they ask for them or not, and other failures, both honest mistakes and nefariously done ones.

Congress—more likely, We the People—need to consider a Congressional alteration that limits early voting period to a much shorter period, say, one week. Congress—more likely, We the People—need also to consider limiting mail-in ballots to absentee ballots positively requested by a voter and with those ballots requested only with a reasonable excuse for not voting in person (e.g., a military member stationed outside his voting precinct).

Ubiquitous Battery-Powered Vehicles

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These need things; here’s a partial list of Critical Items and some problems associated with their acquisition.

With respect to batteries, the raw materials—lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, among others—are expensive to mine and destructive of the environment to mine. Both the metals themselves and the mining tailings are highly toxic and expensive to handle and to dispose of.

Refining those materials comes with its own problems:

[The People’s Republic of China] processes some 70% of the world’s lithium and cobalt, and 99% of the manganese, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. [The PRC] also dominates the market for the parts that go into batteries, such as cathodes and anodes, as well as the production of batteries themselves.

And this:

[The] majority of motors used in today’s EVs rely on permanent magnets, which produce a constant magnetic field that helps spin a motor’s rotor and, in turn, power the wheels.
But these magnets require costly rare-earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium. As with battery ingredients, the dominant supplier is [the PRC], and producing the metals can cause pollution

That makes us dependent on an enemy nation for our economic welfare.

On the other hand, there are such things as AC induction motors. These are a 19th century invention and are ubiquitous in today’s household appliances. However.

[They are] less efficient. That can reduce a vehicle’s driving range unless battery storage is boosted.

That increased battery dependence would make us even more dependent on that enemy nation for the materials. Aside from that, induction motors also take a double potful of copper, and copper mining is destructive of the environment.

And this: the electricity distribution infrastructure needed to for recharging the batteries doesn’t yet exist, and the current grid already is nearly fully occupied just handling today’s household and business loads.

And this: the production of electricity depends on inconstant solar and wind facilities, on fossil fuel (reliable and cheap, but currently under attack by the Left), and on nuclear power (currently hugely expensive to produce, with the building of additional nuclear power facilities even more expensive due to enormously expensive over-regulation).

The root problem (to use a phrase), then, is to get government out of the way of fossil fuel use and out of the way of adding nuclear power reactors to the electricity distribution grid. And expanding the grid to handle the increased load.

He Chose

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Alec Baldwin claims that he’s blameless when he fired his pistol, which shot led to the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of Joel Souza on the set of his movie, Rust. He’s suing a number of movie production personnel in his effort to duck his own responsibility.

Baldwin’s claim is that the movie production team’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed; assistant director, David Halls; an assistant armorer, Seth Kenney; and the team’s prop master, Sarah Zachry, are the only ones responsible for the shooting. Baldwin’s lawyer, Luke Nikas, enumerated what he claims is the fatal chain of events.

Gutierrez-Reed failed to check the bullets or the gun carefully, Halls failed to check the gun carefully and yet announced the gun was safe before handing it to Baldwin, and Zachry failed to disclose that Gutierrez-Reed had been acting recklessly off set.

Leave aside the irrelevance of Gutierrez-Reed’s alleged off-set behavior; that’s just smoke Nikas is blowing to distract from his larger, and utterly cynical, omission of the final link in the chain and the primary and proximate cause of the shooting.

Baldwin—any handler of a firearm, but especially the final handler, intending actually to use the firearm, whether in a real situation or in a movie scene—has a responsibility personally to check the firearm for its safety status, including—especially including—whether the firearm is loaded and, if so, with live rounds. The user doing that final check obviates all of the mistakes anyone earlier in the firearm’s chain of custody might have made.

It’s likely enough that one or more of the persons in Nikas’ abridged chain of events made their own safety check mistakes. That, though, does not at all absolve Baldwin of his own responsibility to do his own, personal, check of the pistol in his hand as soon as he accepted it.

He had the final responsibility, a Critical Item responsibility, to check his pistol as soon as he took possession of it. Baldwin chose to not exercise his responsibility.

Red Lines

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President Joe Biden (D) is meeting today with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting occurring in Indonesia. Supposedly, on the Biden-Xi agenda will be Biden’s desire to exchange red lines with Xi—each to learn the other’s.

I’m skeptical of the utility of such an exchange.

The problems with Biden and Xi exchanging red lines are two: Biden will respect Xi’s and Xi will not respect Biden’s, and Biden will not enforce his while Xi will enforce his forcefully in the unlikely possibility Biden does stray.

And one more: what would Biden do if his red lines conflict with Xi’s. It’s clear what Xi would do.

Update: In the realization, Biden was too timid even to mention the idea of red lines. All he had were some bland words of concern regarding “Taiwan” and the Taiwan Strait. Not a syllable about the PRC’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and the PRC’s seizure, occupation, and militarization of so many South China Sea islands that are owned by other nations rimming that Sea (even if that ownership often is disputed among those nations). Not a minim about the PRC’s aggressive behavior in the East China Sea and the associated threats the PRC makes toward Japan.

Useful Talks

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The US and the Republic of China this week began direct talks regarding pushing our trade and general economic relationship.

The US and [the Republic of China] are set to begin two days of face-to-face meetings in New York on Tuesday aimed at strengthening trade and economic ties at a time of ramped-up tensions between Washington and Beijing.

It also would be useful for the US to greatly strengthen our political ties with the RoC, as well as sharply increase our defense relationship with, and arms sales and transfers to, that nation, followed by SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS Mark Milley traveling to the RoC to meet with Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng and Chief of the General Staff Chen Pao-yu, followed in turn by President Joe Biden traveling to the RoC to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen.

In the alternative, it would be nearly as useful for those meetings to occur at the Pentagon and in the Oval Office of the White House.