Monthly Archives: June 2025

Lose the Claptrap

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Bank management teams are trekking to Conservative States in an effort to get back in the good graces of State governments whose governors and legislatures disdain woke and otherwise bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies like redlining whole industries such as gun manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction. These bank management teams are trying to convince the States that they’ve left off those policies and now only lend, or not, for financial, legal, and reputational reasons.

Therein lies these bank managers’ disingenuousness and cynicism. Refusing to do business over “reputational reasons” is just a weasel-worded excuse for discriminating against industries and individual companies about which someone might object. Or even about which a whole political party might object. In either of those cases, “reputational risk” would be wholly manufactured rather than something intrinsically extant in the market.

The only lending criteria for a bank, or any other financial institution lending money, should be the borrower’s likelihood of repaying and the legality of the borrower’s activity. Bank management teams must exclude the chimerical “reputational risk” and do so in a publicly provable manner. Petty political considerations must never be allowed into what is at bottom a purely market and finance question. Banks that do not achieve this should join the growing list of banks already barred from doing business with State governments over their bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies.

More Progressive-Democrat Disingenuosity

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Brad Lander, Progressive-Democratic Party Comptroller for New York City and Party candidate for Mayor, wrote to The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section to brag about his arrest by ICE agents as those agents attempted to take into custody (ultimately successfully so) an illegal alien. Lander wrote

…Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively arrested me for the heinous act of…walking alongside a frightened asylum seeker and asking to see the warrant law enforcement was using to justify his arrest.

Lander did far more than that. Lander had his hand holding onto the illegal alien’s shoulder, impeding the ICE agents’ ability to move their charge along, and Lander actively and directly moved to block the agents themselves. He wasn’t just verbally demanding to see a warrant. Then, when the agents moved to arrest him for his obstruction, Lander strongly physically resisted his arrest.

Lander’s broad distortion of the facts of his obstruction and subsequent arrest is one more demonstration that we cannot trust the current crop of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

A Thought

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I had another one. This one was brought to my forebrain by a Wall Street Journal article that discussed the lack of Russian military assistance to Iran during the latter’s attacks on Israel and Israel’s nearly two week response in and over Iran.

Israel’s responses to the Iranian war over those dozen days included the virtual elimination of Iran’s air defense capability; reduction of Iran’s ballistic missile capability, both missile production and launchers and launcher production; and Iran’s drone inventory and drone production capability.

It’s that last that interests me. I’ve already seen an apparent reduction in Russian missile attacks on Ukraine since the UA’s successful attacks on Russia’s LRA, at least compared to the number of drone attacks on Ukraine. Iran has been a major source of Russia’s longer-ranged and bigger payload capable drones, the Shaheds. Iran’s ability to produce these were particular targets of Israel’s anti-drone sorties. I wonder what effect the seemingly inevitable drop in exports to Russia will have on Russia’s aerial assaults on Ukraine. It’s true enough that Russia has a growing domestic capability to produce drones roughly equivalent to the Shahed, but that capability isn’t all that yet.

NATO’s Promises

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A NATO pledge. President Donald Trump (R) appears close to getting NATO nations to pledge to raise their NATO-related defense spending to 5% of each nation’s GDP, which would be a marked increase in those nations’ spending.

I question the value of those nations’ promises. Fully a third of NATO’s member nations already have, and are, welching on prior commitments to spend money on NATO-related expenses, for all that Trump’s open questioning of the value of the alliance over its freeloading on American treasure and blood has contributed to an increase in the number of nations that spend adequate amounts on NATO (from five or six!) to the current roughly two-thirds.

The value of a new, and replacement, arrangement centered on the US and the Three Seas Initiative nations is looking better and better.

Leadership Here Isn’t Important

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Folks are getting worried about the Trump administration’s moves to roll back hydrogen, carbon capture, and green energy initiatives, claiming such moves give leadership in those areas to the People’s Republic of China and to Europe.

Lost in the discussions—or simply ignored—is any discussion, any concern at all, of why we should care about leading the world in those technologies. The Left’s concern is centered on the premise of an impending climate disaster for the planet.

That premise, though, is far from established. The date of no return, past which that claimed disaster becomes unavoidable, keeps receding into the future. Climate models still can’t predict simultaneously the past and the present, and they have been shown over the last 25+ years to have badly overstated their predictions of global warming in each of those 25+ years. And, there’s the usual litany of ignored climate data regarding geologically historical atmospheric CO2 concentrations, how we’re still cooler than the geological planetary warming trend these 11,000 years after the last glaciation period, and on and on.

To the contrary, it might be useful to let the PRC waste its resources leading the way down that road to nowhere important. We don’t need to waste our resources racing to keep up with, much less stay in front of, the PRC.